The Path Not Tread
by BoxyP
Summary: Sometimes all that's needed for enormous differences is a small change, as small as the order of a few sentences in a heated row. Lily Evans unconsciously makes one such change while arguing with her best friend, and the magnitude of consequences her actions cause holds the potential to reshape not only herself and the people around her, but their world's very future. A What-if AU
1. Prologue: When Girl Met Boy

**A/N**

Perhaps a little foreword, so that you can know what to expect.

I am a writer who is big on the psychology and sociology of multiple characters - their development with respect to themselves (psychology) and with respect to the people they interact with (sociology). I don't believe in bashing, I believe in reasoned criticism plausibly delivered within the story, that serves as one of the tools to further character development. Taking that into account, I'll try to be as candid as possible about the positive _and_ negative qualities of every character, be they Severus, Lily, the Marauders, or secondaries. I will also attempt not to be blatantly pro or anti any faction, with the primary focus being on Lily and Severus, though the Marauders will come a bit more prominently into focus as the story moves further in. Romance will play a big part in the back half of the story, but will not be the sole dominant genre, as I am interested in a variety of interactions, not just romantic ones, and while the centerpieces of the story (as should be obvious by the end of this prologue) will be Severus and Lily from the beginning to the end, I aim for it to be something of an ensemble story expanding well beyond this twosome, especially once the timeline reaches the height of the First Wizarding War. The potential is there in canon, and the relative obscurity of the period allows for plenty of room for storytelling, which I plan to put to good use.

The story will be divided into a number of 'Parts' - you can think of these parts as relatively self-contained stories within the larger narrative (like individual stories in a series, except I chose to have them all together as one story), therefore while it's necessary to read them in order for proper understanding, for those who feel enormous fanfics are hard to digest, taking breaks between reading each part shouldn't affect the understanding of the narrative.

So, without further ado...

* * *

 **Prologue: When Girl Met Boy**

Lily Evans met Severus Snape when she was nine years old.

He had been a sallow, stringy thing even then, dressed in mismatched, tattered clothes: jeans that were too short and coat that was too large, with a strange smock-like shirt under it. His hair had been too long and his nose had been hooked; the thing that had drawn her the most, even then, had been his eyes – blacker than night, blacker than coal, blacker even than an abyss, yet with just a trace of the iris' outline, darker still in the very middle, so that they held a sense of endless depth, rather than a flat surface.

Her first thought had been that he was a rude boy; the first thing he'd said to her was that she was a witch (she understood later that he wasn't actually being rude, just that she'd misunderstood). He had looked silly in that big coat of his, with his cheeks splotched red and his voice high-pitched.

Petunia had been rude to him; he had been rude to her right back, and Lily had followed her big sister's lead, because Tuney always knew best. But that night, she'd remained awake in her bed, listening to her sister's light snores, and had thought of how the boy had said that she was a witch, and that he was a wizard, and that his mum was a witch, and she'd thought of wishing to fly so badly it hurt inside, of letting go of the swing and feeling like she could stay in the air forever, of how Tuney had complained so shrilly and had demanded that she stop when the flower had danced on her palm.

And the next day, when she'd seen the strange Snape boy again in the park, in those same clothes, with that same strange expression on his face, she'd snuck away from Tuney and gone to up to him, said 'Hi, I'm Lily, what's your name?' and he'd said, muttered, really, 'I'm Severus', with his cheeks as splotched red as they'd been the day before.

She would never forget his face when she'd asked him to tell her what witches and wizards were, and why he thought she was one of them, that shocking mix of elation and happiness and covetousness and fear (though it would take her years to parse out every little thing from that memory, until she would be sure that she understood it fully).

And her life had become that much more interesting because of her new acquaintance.

* * *

Lily Evans was ten years old the first time she thought that Severus Snape wasn't altogether too ugly, some of the time.

He'd been telling her about Hogwarts and wands and the Ministry, and she'd asked him, begged him in her own mind, to tell her that he wasn't taking the mickey with all his stories (the way Tuney had gotten to insisting whenever Lily so much as mentioned Sev), to tell her that it was all real ('It _is_ real, isn't it?' she'd asked). He'd been cross-legged in front of her, with his coat off and his oddly cut hair (he'd told her that his mother hadn't seen well enough to cut it properly, but Lily had had a thought that maybe something had interrupted the haircut) for once not hanging over his face, leaning back with his palms planted on the green grass and a confident little smile emerging in the corners of his mouth ('Definitely', he'd said), and she'd had a stray thought that self-assurance really suited him so much better than embarrassment.

And then he'd told her that it didn't make any difference that she was Muggle-born, and she'd been too young, too enchanted with the idea of magic and Hogwarts and wands and owls, too absorbed in her own luck to notice his hesitation, to notice the way he'd watched her, even then. She'd been too deaf to hear the lie in his voice, and too blind to see the greed in his eyes, too sheltered to understand what it might mean, and even if she had not been, if she had heard the lie for what it was, and had seen the greed for what it represented, and had had the experience to give it meaning, she would still have been too happy that she could share this with someone, anyone, too happy that there was another who wished to spend so much time with her explaining things that must have been so obvious and normal to him, to care.

Then he'd made the branch hit Tuney over the shoulder and Lily had gotten angry with him, and the moment had vanished like so much smoke, so that she'd not think to return to it until many years in the future, when she would question everything and anything, and wonder what might have been, had she known then his true nature.

* * *

Severus Snape saw Lily Evans when he was nine years old.

She had been the prettiest thing he'd ever seen in his short life, with her rich red hair and her blazing green eyes and her rosy lips. He'd thought her the prettiest thing in the world even before he'd seen her trying to fly off the swing and succeeding. Then he'd thought her the only thing in the world he wished for.

He'd hated her horse-faced sister, for being the one who got to talk to her and play with her and listen to her and be known to her. He'd hated the older girl even more when she'd ruined his first attempt at gaining that attention for himself, and more still for trying to stop Lily from being his friend. He might have hated her the most that day after he'd gotten so very angry and embarrassed with himself ('What is that you're wearing, anyway?' she'd said. 'Your mum's blouse?') that he'd snapped and the branch had snapped with him, and Lily had left him in the park because he'd told her that he wasn't the one to do it, even when he was.

He'd not understood then, and it would take him years to understand, that what he'd thought and felt in that moment hadn't been a healthy thing, hadn't been something most others would consider appropriate. He'd not understood that Lily would see though his words, and that she would not understand him either. How could she have, when they'd been ten years old and he'd not understood himself?

He'd been so happy that Petunia would no longer be in the way, that day on the Hogwarts Express, that he'd not given a thought to what Lily had been feeling because her big sister had called her a freak. He'd had no siblings, and perhaps, if he had, he might have been more considerate; he would doubt that in the years to come, because he'd been a boy who'd never had what he'd wanted, and he'd wanted Lily so badly it had hurt, deep inside, had wanted her with a singular focus that had excluded everything else, including her feelings, so that she'd become, in the two years of their friendship, a paragon of perfection, untouchable, unreachable, and, ultimately, not really just an eleven-year-old girl who'd been hurting because a person precious to her had scorned her. He would find himself wishing that he'd been a different boy back then, so that he might have taken her hand and hugged her and promised that he'd find a way to fix it for her, instead of ignoring it and telling her that she better be in Slytherin.

Then the damned Marauders had come into his life and Lily had been sorted into Gryffindor when he'd gone to Slytherin, and the world had become too large and demanding to let him have what he'd so badly wished for.

* * *

Severus Snape was almost fourteen years old the first time he knew that Lily Evans might not choose him, if she were forced to make a choice.

It had been near the Christmas hols, and he'd managed to accidentally embarrass Peter Pettigrew in their Transfigurations class ('Even second-years should know _that_ spell,' and the stupid little git had proven him wrong not half a minute later), so the foursome had retaliated harshly enough to send him scurrying to the hospital wing and Madam Pomfrey's expert care. It had not been the first time that year, or even that month, that they'd found some way of attacking him, but they'd mostly kept to things he could reverse on his own before this.

Madam Pomfrey had been displeased; she'd had that pinched look on her face and had been curt and very annoyed while she'd searched for a way of transfiguring his nose back from the beak that sodding Potter had turned it to.

Lily had found him there and had almost interrogated him on what had happened; she'd been in a bad mood all day ('I'd really hoped that mine wouldn't be painful, but this is truly horrible; Tuney has it so lucky,' she'd complained to sixth-year Alice Ainsworth earlier that day while he'd walked behind her, unnoticed, so he'd concluded that she was in some physical discomfort), and had had little patience for his indignation about the event. She'd actually told him that he shouldn't have been so scathing of Pettigrew, and though she'd apologised the next day and assured him she knew he hadn't actually meant those words to be about Pettigrew, Severus had still lived through a sleepless night with the discomforting knowledge that Lily, who was his best friend, his only true friend in the world, really, had not seemed inclined to take his side in this, even when she knew about the way those Gryffindor boys persecuted him.

He'd gotten his revenge on Potter later that week, a tit-for-tat, a little Dark Transfiguration that had forced the Golden Boy Mr I'm-Unbeatable-In-Transfiguration Potter to spend the day in the infirmary. Lily had yelled at him, truly yelled at him, for it, and the disappointment in her eyes had burned through him until there had been nothing but bitterness in his stomach; her voice, though, her voice had held that same note of dismissal that his father's always did, the note that told him 'I don't care about your sodding problems, so don't you dare disgrace me like this again', and it had infuriated him, until the words had gotten glued together in his throat in their haste to come out, and he'd been angry enough to break something.

Watching Lily walk away from him that day, he'd had a thought that it wasn't bloody fair that she'd been angry with him for doing the same thing that bloody Potter had done, when she'd not reacted the same when Potter had been the one acting in that way.

Then a little voice in his mind, sounding very much like his disapproving mother, had whispered _And why would that be?_ and the blood in his veins had frozen, because it had come to him that perhaps he wasn't good enough for her to choose him over Potter, were she placed in that position (years later, he would turn it over in his mind a thousand times, to make sure that he fully understood it as the inception of everything that was to come).

And his life would become guided by this thought, by the urge and need to prove to her that Potter wasn't as golden as everyone seemed to think he was, because maybe, just maybe, if she understood that, she'd choose Severus instead.

* * *

 **A/N:** In case anyone's interested, this is a sort-of origin story to another series of mine, The Lion and The Snake, which focuses on Harry Potter timeline. It can be considered a standalone, and while it's not nearly close to being fully written, I'll try my best to keep it coming. I do have it at least roughly planned out, and the chapters should be long enough to tide over.

As with all my other stories, I'd be grateful for a britpicker, and as I have no beta, all mistakes are mine.


	2. Ch I,1: The Flap of Butterfly Wings

**PART I - CHANGE  
**

 **Chapter 1: The Flap of Butterfly Wings**

The argument had started innocuously enough, as most of their arguments did these days. Severus had been late for their study session, and Lily had asked him what had kept him away, more to fill in the small talk quota than anything. He'd said that he'd been with some of his friends, and she'd made a disapproving comment about his _friends_ and things had devolved from there, so that they'd needed to leave the library to have the argument, and even if Sev hadn't though it had ruined the day, she had found herself unable to look at him after it, so she'd hurried out and he'd followed, and now here they were, walking across one of the small castle courtyards towards the Great Hall, she, trying to get ahead of him (escape from him, though she wouldn't admit it to herself) and he, chasing after her (as he always did these days, though she wouldn't admit that to herself either).

"Would you just leave me alone?" she asked, picking up on her pace. "I'm really not in the mood to listen to your excuses and explanations."

"I thought we were supposed to be friends, best friends?" he cried out, and she stopped in her step, turned back to look at him, her ire raised and now out of her control.

"We _are_ , Sev, but I don't like some of the people you're hanging around with! I'm sorry, but I detest Avery and Mulciber! _Mulciber_! What do you see in him, Sev? He's creepy! D'you know what he tried to do to Mary Macdonald the other day?"

"That was nothing," he replied, dismissive, and she clenched her teeth until they hurt. "It was a laugh, that's all–"

"It was Dark Magic, and if you think that's funny–"

"What about the stuff Potter and his mates get up to?" He was growing red in the face, like he always did these days when the topic returned to those four, and the utter hatred in his eyes made her stomach churn.

"What's Potter got to do with anything?" she asked, exasperated with his singular focus on that group. It felt like they always returned to that quartet, no matter what they argued about.

"They sneak out at night. There's something weird about that Lupin. Where does he keep going?"

"He's ill. They say he's ill–"

"Every month at the full moon?"

"I know your theory," she told him, coldly, because no matter how much he had a point (and she _knew_ that he was most likely right, really, how stupid would people have to be not to put two and two together?), Remus was her friend, and Sev's actions were putting him in danger. "Why are you so obsessed with them, anyway? Why do you care what they're doing at night?"

"I'm just trying to show you they're not as wonderful as everyone seems to think they are."

The intensity in his eyes and in his voice made her blush, because they implied things that she'd have rather not thought on, things about his feelings for her and about his ideas on Potter's feelings for her, and even about her own feelings for either of them. Those thoughts made her uncomfortable, made her squirm and itch under her own skin for some reason she wasn't willing to find, and so her anger got all tangled up with her confusion and her discomfort, and the words out of her mouth came before she'd thought them through.

(She would probably never learn that, had she given them a singular thought, had she been just a little more angry and a little less flustered so that she might have said them differently, her world might have ended in five years with terrible red eyes and a blinding green light, with the helpless cries of her baby boy in the crib behind her and the insurmountable fear in her heart for his life wrenching her own helpless scream out of her throat.)

"They don't use Dark Magic, though. I heard what happened the other night. You went sneaking down that tunnel by the Whomping Willow and James Potter saved you from whatever's down there. You're being really ungrateful–"

"Ungrateful?!" he yelled back. "Ungrateful that Sirius Black lured me into a trap so that Remus Lupin could kill me?!"

"What are you talking about?" she countered, frowning, her anger giving way to an uncomfortable knot suddenly lodged into her chest. She would have dismissed it as another one of his exaggerations, except for the way he was blanching, pulling away with wide eyes.

"I'm not supposed to say," he whispered, whirling on his feet and speeding away from her, apparently forgetting that they'd started out the argument with him chasing after her. She hurried after him, desperate to know why he'd said what he did, because it frightened her.

"Sev! Sev, wait! What did you mean by that?!" He was shaking his head at her, refusing to look back. In frustration, she threw his words back at him. "I thought we were supposed to be friends! Best friends!"

He turned back, and there was something beseeching in his eyes that nearly made her give up on her line of questioning. Pushing down on that, she stood her ground instead, as his angry statement rang in her ears over and over again. _Sirius Black lured me into a trap so that Remus Lupin could kill me._

"I can't tell you," he whispered brokenly. "I can't."

"Why not?"

"Look, just let it go, Lily."

"No! No, I'm not letting it go!"

Several passing students were giving them strange looks by now, and, conscious this was not for curious ears, Lily pulled him into the nearest empty classroom, shutting the door behind them.

"Why can't you tell me?"

He looked almost pitiful, torn between telling and not telling. Taking a deep breath through widened nostrils, Lily wondered if she should just let it go. Her own feelings for her childhood best friend were muddled to say the least, and half the time, she wasn't sure she even felt anything for him any longer. Then there were times like these, times when all that was on her mind were their summers, without the constant interference of House rivalry and spiteful, bullying boys, when they could spend hours in the hollow of their tree talking about almost everything. It was just getting so hard to yoyo from one to the other as often as she seemed to be these days.

"Dumbledore forbade me from speaking of it," Severus finally whispered, dejectedly hanging his head down and letting that greasy hair of his obscure her vision of his face. Bewildered, Lily stared at him confusion, the thought of leaving it alone fleeing her head. Sev almost never looked like this, and it was truly frightening her.

"Sev... whatever it is, you can tell me," she tried coaxing, as if he were an injured animal. She knew that he'd lash out if anyone other than her tried to do it, but she stubbornly ignored that strange feeling in her chest at that thought. It made her feel guilty if she thought on it for too long.

He looked up at her as she approached him, allowing her to take his hand with both of hers.

"You can't tell anyone else, Lily, _can't_."

"I won't."

"Promise me."

"I promise," she agreed, wondering with a sinking stomach what it was that Dumbledore had used to force his cooperation, that had made him this desperate to keep the thing hushed up.

(It didn't cross her mind that in some other situation, she would have rather thought that she didn't know what Sev had found to dislike about the Headmaster _now_ , because in normal times, she trusted the old wizard and thought Sev's mistrust completely unfounded. Not now, though; now, Sev's expression frightened her too much, because it was so achingly truthful.)

"My theory, it's true. Lupin is a werewolf. That passage, it leads to the Shrieking Shack, and the thing that's haunting it is Lupin. His band of cronies know that, that's why Black told me about it in the first place, so that I'd be there when Lupin transformed. He almost killed me, Lily!"

"But why would you listen to him in the first place?" she asked, now even more confused.

"You don't understand! You wouldn't–"

"And how would you know if I would or not?" came out sharply, his words stinging her where it hurt. "Because I'm a Mublood? Because I'm just an abomination like Mulciber and Avery think?"

"No, Lily, that's not what I meant!" he replied desperately. "Because you're not a Slytherin!"

"What does my House have to do with anything?"

"I needed leverage, something to make them back off! They've been after me for _years_! At least my friends never tried to kill anyone!"

"Using Dark Magic is as bad as that!"

But there was something very cold in his eyes when he looked down at her, something that nearly made her back off in shock.

"That's all you say? After everything I just told you, you still think so much of Golden Boy Potter and his gang?"

His pulling away was almost physical, something Lily had never seen come from him in her life. Throughout the last two years, they'd had spats increasingly over this point, but not in one of them was Severus the one levying blame. Lily had always felt justified, because those boys he hung out with were evil, were people who enjoyed what they did, who did it for fun. Somehow, the simple fact that they used Dark Magic was enough to place them in a whole other category from James Potter and his three friends, and Severus justifying their behaviour by saying it was only 'a bit of fun', as if he saw nothing wrong with what they did, infuriated her to no end, because it made her think that he was just like them after all, otherwise why would he not have any problems with it?

In her life, Lily had never thought she'd be in danger of losing her friendship with Severus. She'd thought about ending it more than once this year, usually when the other girls started pressuring her about why she hung out with him in the first place. But she'd never even considered the possibility that he'd pull away instead. Deep down, she knew that was because she understood his feelings for her. Or, at least she thought she did. She knew that he loved her in more than a simply platonic way, but she'd chosen to ignore it, to keep the status quo, because she wasn't sure she even wanted to be friends with him, after everything, let alone something more.

And the realisation that suddenly, there was the possibility of him going against what she thought she knew about him, it made her chest ache in a wholly unexpected way. It also made that guilt rise back up, because she suddenly saw the thing she'd been trying to avoid, the terrible thought that there were times when she'd relied on knowing his feelings for her to manipulate the situation to her own advantage, to what she wanted it to be. Did that make her any better than everyone else?

When she was a little girl, Lily had had a phase in which she was obsessed with equality rights. It was around the same time she'd become friends with Severus, when their newspapers held the information about the war America was waging in Vietnam and the struggles of their black people to be accepted. All that was swept aside when she'd been introduced to this world, the one she belonged to now, but she still remembered that belief that all were equal. It was, perhaps, why she hated Severus' friends so much, because they took that away from her, they discriminated based on something that just couldn't be helped, wasn't chosen by the people they tormented, was ultimately unavoidable.

So when had she allowed herself to be so blinded by this as to think that deliberate murder of anyone was in any way more acceptable than some other form of violence?

She had obviously been staring at him for too long, because with one last pain-filled look, Severus moved to step around her and join the throng of people out there. Breath catching in her throat, she lunged for him, grabbing his arm in a vice grip and making him stop in his step.

"Why aren't they expelled?" she asked, hoping it was the right thing to say, suddenly desperate to fix this newest crack in their already fragmented relationship, one that somehow, for once, seemed to be of her own making. "The Headmaster knows, doesn't he? Why didn't he expel them?"

"Because Black is the first of that house to be sorted into Gryffindor," Severus replied with a nasty sneer. "Because no one was hurt, so it should just be swept under the rug like all the other things they ever did to me. Because everyone thinks Potter's– that he's–"

He didn't seem able to finish the sentence in his anger.

Lily's anger bubbled up in response. With renewed fury, righteous fury for her best friend for once in the last two years, she marched out of the classroom, Severus' hurried footsteps trailing after her.

"Lily! Lily, stop! Where are you going?! Lily!"

"I'm going to give him a piece of my mind!" she exclaimed, unable to stop her fists from clenching, unaware that people were staring again.

"Lily, don't! It's not worth it! Lily–"

"Not worth it?!" Whirling in her spot, she stared him down. "How can you say that, Sev?! _You're_ worth it!" He seemed somewhat taken aback by her fierce exclamation. Not wasting that moment of his distraction, she continued with her stomping.

"Lily, he's the Headmaster, you can't just go barging in–"

"Oh, yes I can!"

Her best friend could have died. She could have been walking around today in a world that didn't contain Sev. And the Headmaster had done _nothing_ about it?!

"Lily, he can expel you!"

But she was beyond reason right about then, because the thought that she could have lost her oldest friend forever had finally sunk in fully. She may have thought that she could break off her friendship with him, but she knew that she couldn't even think of the possibility of him dead.

"For what, for contradicting him?! The last time I checked, there was such a thing as freedom of speech! If he's willing to do that, than he's no better than any dark wizard!"

Total silence descended on the corridor, but she didn't notice that any more than she did the look of pure shock on Severus' face. Grateful only that he'd stopped following her, she proceeded to the Headmaster Dumbledore's office, forcing herself to focus primarily on the thought of Severus dead, rather than implications her anger raised of the person she was turning into. She'd think of that later.

* * *

When Lily barged into the Headmaster's office, Dumbledore was seated at his desk, reading from a parchment in his hand.

"Ah, Miss Evans," he greeted her, only to be cut off by her indignant exclamation.

"Why didn't you do anything?!"

"Pardon?"

"Sev told me what happened! Why didn't you do anything about it?! They tried to kill him!"

"It was only a harmless–"

"Harmless? _Harmless?!_ Sirius Black knew very well what he was doing when it did it! He knew how it might end! So why aren't they punished for it?!"

"Miss Evans, control yourself," Dumbledore said, much more sternly. Breathing heavily, Lily tried to do just that. In trying to avoid other thoughts, she'd spun herself up too much. She had no right to yell at the Headmaster of her school, one of the greatest wizards of all times. Demand an explanation, yes; shout at him, not so muhc.

"I'm sorry, Professor," she said when she could speak in the normal decibel range again. "I apologise for yelling at you. But he's my best friend, and he could have died because of them!"

"I take it, then, that Mr Snape has told you of the events that transpired three week ago?"

"Not on purpose," she admitted. "We were arguing, and it slipped out. I, erm, got him to tell me everything. It really wasn't his fault."

"Let us leave the blame aside for a moment. Would you, please, take a seat?" He waited until she did so, before speaking again. "You are a bright young woman, Miss Evans. I have no doubt that you can infer the reasons for my actions in this case, if only you apply your brilliant mind to it."

"What..."

"Think of the people involved, Miss Evans," he coaxed her. Frowning, she did as he demanded despite the annoyance she felt at this. Severus, who was a Slytherin Half-blood without much wealth or a happy home life. Remus, who always seemed like a quiet, bookish type. Potter and Black, from rich Pure-blood fam– "It's because of who they are, isn't it?" she asked, almost horrified by it. "Because they're Pure-bloods."

The Headmaster looked at her somewhat sadly. "Not exactly. What do you imagine would happen if I had expelled the eldest heir to the Black family? How do you think his parents would have reacted in that instance?"

"They'd want someone to blame," she responded automatically.

"And how aware are you of prosecutorial law in cases involving werewolves?"

Only then did it finally dawn on her, what exactly he was talking about. "They'd have wanted Remus executed for it!"

It made sense; the Black family was notorious for being one of the Darkest wizarding families of Britain; they would not have wanted their heir to be associated with a werewolf, let alone be best friends with one. They might have wanted to go after Sev, too, but he was a Slytherin, and Lily had no doubt they'd rather place the blame on a Gryffindor werewolf and the school headmaster who'd allowed a werewolf attendance, than a Slytherin who showed obvious interest in the sort of people Blacks supported.

"Yes. So you see, because no one was gravely injured in the incident, I thought it best to leave it at that and save an innocent life from the folly of his friend."

Groaning, she allowed her head to drop in her hands. Now that she was somewhat calmer, she could think of it more critically, and that righteous anger was starting to extend to Remus as well. "But it's still not fair," she found herself mumbling. "Potter and Black don't care if they get detention, they still bully Sev as much as always. I know it's Remus' life, but they aren't held responsible for their actions, and that is not right!"

"There is something else that is truly bothering you," the old wizard noticed, stepping around his desk to join her in the adjacent chair.

"He thinks you did it because you favour them," she explained, turning her head slightly to look at him through her red hair. "I'm scared that he'll do something stupid. He keeps company with people who believe in that Dark Wizard's propaganda, and I don't like it. But he won't listen to me!" Feeling foolish suddenly, Lily straightened back in her chair. "I'm sorry for bothering you, Headmaster. I didn't mean any disrespect."

"You are no bother at all, Miss Evans," Dumbledore assured her. "Your concern for your friend is quite understandable, and very noble of you."

She wanted to ask him to do something about it, but after nearly blowing his door off its hinges in her anger, she simply couldn't. In any case, she was doubtful it would result in anything – not only did Severus not trust Dumbledore, but there was also no reason for the Headmaster to take any interest in any singular student, especially not as a favour to another, even if she _was_ a prefect.

One thing, she was sure of. She didn't feel noble about any of this. She only felt as if she'd taken smudged glasses off her eyes, for some unfathomable reason.

"He's my best friend," she said, almost numbly. "Though it doesn't feel like it most of the time anymore. He's pulling away, and I don't know what to do. All he does these days is come up with spells he can use against Potter and Black, and reads those Dark Magic books of his mother's."

"We are, each of us, responsible for our own fates, Miss Evans. Only in adversity can our spirits show their true colours. Perhaps Mr Snape will surprise you yet."

"I hope you're right, Professor, but I can't stop myself from doubting it. Anyway, I'm sorry for being so disrespectful. I'll... go now," she said, somewhat awkwardly, getting to her feet. "Thank you for listening, sir."

"If you have any further misgivings, you are always welcome. I trust that you understand why confidentiality is so important in this instance?"

"Of course," she agreed, stepping to the door. She had no intention of revealing any of it, especially because it would result in Remus being expelled. That thought, however, brought back another question. "Headmaster," she inquired, turning to look at him, "how did you convince Severus not to speak of it?"

"I imparted on him the gravity of the situation. He is a reasonable young man, even if his animosity towards the other boys is very obvious and justified. Why do you ask?"

"It's nothing, just... he seemed to think... never mind."

"If you are afraid of insulting me, Miss Evans, there is no need for that."

She bit her lip in contemplation. Should she tell or not? Would Severus be angry with her? "He seemed almost frightened, and when I decided to, erm, visit you, he thought I would get into trouble. I just don't really understand why he'd behave like that."

Dumbledore's eyes hooded, and he appeared to age before her eyes. "Alas, sometimes, Miss Evans, making the right choice is the hardest thing one can do. It was not my intention to instil any such fear in young Mr Snape, and it grieves me to hear that he thinks that."

She didn't know what to respond to that, so she only nodded and ducked through the doors, thinking of the way to convince Severus of the real reason the Marauders had scraped off so lightly and not come out looking like she favoured them.

* * *

When Lily emerged from beyond the stone gargoyle, Severus felt a little dizzy as his anxiety left him in one fell swoop. He'd been so scared that she'd anger the Headmaster and get herself into trouble, that he'd almost worked himself into a fit.

He shouldn't have spoken to her like that, he knew. She was pulling away from him, and he could see it, so very painfully, but no matter what he did, no matter what he said, nothing seemed to change the situation any. With each day that went by, Potter was coming closer and closer to her, and Sev was losing her, little by little.

He shouldn't have responded in that way, but he was just so tired of hearing her defend Precious Potter, tired of hearing how the other boy was winning her over, stealing her away from Severus, and the very thought that she would blame him even for nearly dying had made something hard and cold blossom in his chest.

For a moment, he'd truly believed that she cared so little for his life, and it had cut his insides to shreds.

So he'd responded in the only way he knew how, by getting angry and lashing out. Anger was an old friend of Severus'; he'd been angry most of his life, angry at the ease with which Golden Boy Potter accomplished things that Severus had to struggle with, ease with which other people flocked to that wanker, like he was Merlin's gift to all and sunder, anger at his mother's apathy and his father's hatred, anger at never having what everyone else did, anger at being ignored and belittled and sneered down on, anger at all the professors who knew what Potter and his lot did to him every week and not doing jack-squat about it, anger at all those friends of Lily's who demanded her attention, anger at Petunia trying to pull Lily away from him, anger at the werewolf for being Lily's friend, anger at the pitying looks that little shit had the gall to send him while his friends hexed Severus whenever the chance presented itself, anger at Black's sneering face and his sharp words, anger at all the rest of the Slytherins for being respected when all he ever got was disdain, anger at the Headmaster for favouring his little golden lions, anger at the whole fucking world for saddling him with this lot in life.

Anger at himself, most of all, for seemingly never being able to fix everything that went to shit in his life.

And then Lily had looked at him with her usual dissatisfaction in those gorgeous green eyes, and had defended those fucking Marauders after he'd told her they'd tried to kill him, and he'd snapped. That anger, which had always stayed away from Lily, had always given him a little respite when he was with her, had finally pushed through, and he'd gotten angry with her, too, for valuing his life so little after everything he'd ever done for her and given her, and he'd snapped at her, had thought, very clearly, that he was done with her, too, because he was just sick of it, all of it.

And when she'd done nothing but stare at him, in a sort-of slack-jawed, stunned way, the urge to flee had overcome his anger, and he'd turned to run away and find a place to crawl and die, because he was sure that their friendship was over, and what else did he have in his miserable life but Lily and her friendship?

Which was why he'd been completely caught off guard when she'd reached out for him; her fingers had been cold as ice, even though the sleeves of his robes, and her eyes had been wide and pleading, so he'd answered her question, but the anger had still been there, and he'd not even tried to control it in his voice, on his face.

Then she'd gone and gotten it into her head that she could confront Dumbledore about it, and he'd not only been scared shitless that she'd get into trouble for it, he'd actually felt as if something had hit him over the head when she'd said that he was worth her reckless actions.

So now here she was, walking out, clearly much calmer and not too upset, which had to mean she wasn't expelled, and he needed to take some deep breaths to regain his equilibrium.

"Sev," she said as soon as she spotted him. Her steps halted, and she tucked a strand of that beautiful hair behind her ear as she chewed on her lip. He could do nothing but watch her, having absolutely no clue where they stood and how to move from that unknown.

Finally, she seemed to gather her resolve; she walked over to him and offered an apologetic smile.

"I'm fine, see? Professor Dumbledore didn't do anything to me."

"He didn't?" Severus repeated, a little stunned. _Nothing_?

"He, ah... he talked to me, explained why he'd done what he'd done. Come on, let's go find a place to talk."

Right, talked to her. Severus' disdain for the Headmaster rose instantly. Oh, he had no doubt that he'd _talked_ to Lily. Talked her right into his own point of view, no doubt, and that certainly didn't align with Severus' own.

Still, he followed after her as she went hunting for an empty room, and hoped beyond hope that she wouldn't dismiss this like everyone else had done, because he didn't know what he'd do otherwise.

She pulled him into a girls' bathroom and locked the door with a wave of her wand, before turning to him.

"He let me rant for a bit and then confirmed what you'd told me – he promised me you'd not be in trouble for breaking your promise of silence – and then he explained his reasoning to me."

"Which is?"

"Which is that Remus Lupin is as innocent in this as you are, and that it is extremely likely that, had they been expelled, as Dumbledore admitted they should have been, then Remus might have ended up being blamed for it, and might have been killed."

"Of course," he muttered, clenching his fists at his sides. Of course Lupin's miserable life was worth more than Severus', because Lupin was a Gryffindor charity case, a Dark creature prowling among the populace of the school, and who cared one sodding shit about Severus feeling safe in that populace.

The walls of despair were slowly closing in on him, one brick at a time. Home hadn't been truly safe for years, and he'd felt, in the beginning, even in spite of Potter and his gang, that Hogwarts was a safe place. Not anymore; not after what had happened in February. Not even Lily, it seemed, because she sounded like she agreed with Dumbledore on this, like she held Lupin's safety above Severus', and if she did, _if she_ did... He didn't think there was a single truly safe place left, and he _needed_ to have a safe place, _needed_ it to breathe normally, to find his clarity, to claw his way out of the miserable existence that was his life.

"Sev, I'm sorry about what happened, and you're absolutely right, something more drastic should have been done to punish them for it. I'll do what I can to keep them away from you, I promise, all right, but I don't think there's anything more to be done about this."

"I could have told you that from the start," he replied bitterly, wrapping his arms around himself at the chill inside.

"Sev, please don't do this," Lily asked, and he gave her a look meant to convey all he was feeling and didn't know how to say. She'd always known how to read him, something he'd resented for a long time, but also something that he loved, that there was one person who knew him so well that he couldn't hide from them, just one person who saw into him and didn't flinch away.

Now, it felt like Lily _was_ , like he kept losing her more and more even when it seemed like he was winning her back, like everything he tried to do only led further and further down an unavoidable path.

He was dreading to final destination that that path led to.

"I'd do something about it if I could, I swear I would," she insisted, and the desperation in her voice broke through his glacial anger. "I'm going to give Potter and Black a piece of my mind about this, at least, and, and... and you know what? We can ask Professor Dumbledore for his Pensieve, and I'll show you the memory of their faces when they realise they'd not gotten off as scot-free as they think! I'm sure he'd let us use the Pensieve for it. And I'll help you plan revenge, yeah? I'm not a complete bore, after all, I can prank with the best of them."

She was babbling, nonsensical things really, but Severus felt his anger cool and his tension unwind as he listened to her, finding himself remembering why it was that that she was so important to him, feeling like he did when they were in Cokeworth and there was no one else in the world but the two of them.

"You're not a bore," he told her, almost automatically picking up on her last sentence, and she offered him a tumultuous smile, stepping closer.

"I wish you'd told me when it happened," she said softly. "I can't imagine how horrible it must have been for you, to go through all of that alone."

"It's fine," he promised her because, mostly, when she looked at him like that, everything was fine. "I'm... I'm glad you know." He felt less alone when she knew his secrets, though he'd never dare to tell her that, never dare show her how essential she was to him, how much she ruled him already.

Lily smiled at him and stepped into his personal space, her arms winding around his neck as she hugged him tightly. Severus, frozen in shock, did nothing for so long that, when he finally thought to hug her back, she was pulling away, the smile still on her face.

"We on for study tomorrow?"

"Yes, of course," he answered by rote, needing a moment to internalise the sharp tang of regret that he'd missed his chance to hug her. He didn't dare ask her for it again, though he wanted to, almost desperately. "And you owe me that memory," he said instead, trying for light-hearted and probably falling well short of the mark. Still, it made her smile widen, so he let it go without self-flagellation.

"Definitely. And Sev, if anything like this happens again, you tell me, all right? I want to know."

"I will," he promised, hoping beyond hope that he'd never have to break that promise to her, but knowing that it was inevitable.

* * *

Climbing the steps to the seventh floor and the Gryffindor Common Room took more effort than Lily thought it should have, but her thoughts were heavy and her heart with them. Severus could have died, and she wouldn't have even known if he hadn't accidentally spilled a smidge of truth in his ire. Would he have let her go their whole lives without telling her how close she came to losing him? Did he truly think that she cared so little, that she'd think it inconsequential? The thought was as maddening as it was dispiriting, because, like it or not, Lily was losing him to the Darkness, to his fascination with power and to the loneliness he'd been living in for years and years, and it seemed that even she wasn't enough to keep him on the right path.

And Potter, Black, Pettigrew and Remus, they were not helping it in the least. She shouldn't have ignored Severus' complaints for so long, shouldn't have belittled them. She knew that had contributed to him not telling her anything, because he probably felt like he couldn't trust her anymore, and that was damning of their friendship as a whole.

James Potter and his group were in the Common Room when she entered; as always, the stupid prat was playing with that damned Snitch of his on the floor by the couch on which Sirius Black sprawled, twirling his wand and transfiguring pastries from the basket in Peter Pettigrew's lap. Beside them, on the sofa chair, sat Remus Lupin, head buried in his Transfiguration textbook. One look at Sirius Black's vain expression was enough to get that rage bubbling back up again and chase her lethargy away. Pursing her lips in vexation, Lily nearly stomped to them and stood over the sprawled out boy on the couch.

"Evans!" Black exclaimed lightly. "What brings you to my humble self?"

"Humble?" she nearly sneered. "Get up, Black, before I make a scene for the whole Tower."

"What's got your knickers in a twist?"

"A little... incident that happened a few weeks ago, out by the Whomping Willow," she hissed through her teeth, eyes moving to Remus' still slightly sickly form in the adjacent chair as his face paled considerably. The other three boys were watching her, and with some satisfaction, she noticed Potter's slight cringe from the corner of her eye.

"What shite's Snivelly been spewing now?" Potter asked, scrunching his nose in disgust.

"You should better ask what the _Headmaster_ has told me, Potter," she shot back, her mood only plummeting down with that damned nickname. "And what did I tell you about calling him that?" Turning back, she locked eyes with Black's. "Now, you little prat, before I make this public knowledge."

"You wouldn't!" Potter exclaimed, while Remus went white as a sheet.

"Good to know at least one of your friends cares for your well-being, Remus," she said over his head. "Seeing how Black here doesn't give two Knuts for it either way, does he?"

"Look, Evans, it was all just a little fun."

"Fun?!" she screeched out, barely stifling the urge to kick him in the side. "Fun?! You call that _fun_?!"

"Jeez, Evans, settle down. In any case, I don't see how this is any of your business."

"You put two of my friends in life-threatening danger," she whispered into his face, aware that by now everyone else was watching, but also that Potter had had the presence of mind to cast a silencing spell around them so as not to be overheard. "One of whom you claim to be your best friend. I knew you were self-centred, Black, but I didn't know you were psychopathic."

"He should have kept that big nose of his out of our business."

"Like you do his?" she shot back. "And did it for a moment cross your mind what would happen to Remus, how _he_ would feel, if that little plan of yours had gone all the way through, huh? How much guilt you'd dump on his shoulders for something that would have been your fault? Did if for one moment occur to you that you'd be sentencing your _best friend_ to death?! You are no better than those Slytherins you always keep slandering, picking on the weak and abusing the trust given to you by good people. You disgust me." Straightening up, she looked at the other three. "Remus, I honestly don't understand why you would be friends with them after what Black did to you, but if you ever decide to keep some better company, you know where to find me. And stay away from Severus, all of you. Stop behaving like stupid children and grow up already."

Feeling vindicated, she walked back to her dorm room, leaving the four boys to gape after her.

Only hours later did she remember her promise about the memory, and that thought brought a smile to her face; if nothing else, at least Potter had looked mildly disturbed, and that had to count for something, even with Severus.

* * *

That night, Remus didn't sleep. That last transformation had taken a lot out of him, and he'd been only distantly aware of what had happened during that night, but had been too preoccupied with the upcoming O.W.L.s and his own aches and pains to give it much thought. What Lily Evan had said had made it all come back to the forefront of his mind.

He wasn't sure how he felt about it, exactly. The very thought that he could have inflicted his own curse on another person made his skin crawl. Up until this year, he was always so very careful to keep to the Shrieking Shack. With James, Sirius and Peter becoming Animagi, however, he'd become somewhat lax. The transformations were much easier when he could run through the forest with his three friends, and though he didn't remember the nights, he had fewer wounds and ached less all over.

He knew his friends weren't perfect, of course, and he didn't much approve of their fixation with Severus Snape. He understood Sirius' position, of course. Their second year, the Black heir could barely write on his own for the first month until Madam Pomfrey had treated him for nerve damage his mother had inflicted on him over the summer in her anger over his placement in Gryffindor. And he understood that James' own anger with bigoted Pure-bloods stemmed from his father's firm beliefs, as well. Severus Snape was the epitome of everything they hated, and Remus could honestly say that he felt disgust at the boy, as well.

Even so, knowing how great a burden this infliction of his was, he didn't wish it upon anyone, not even the Slytherin boy. When the Headmaster had sorted the thing out, he'd been in the hospital wing, recuperating, and he'd never really heard what exactly the reason for Dumbledore's laxity in this matter was. He was grateful to the man more than he could every say, for enabling him to have a chance at a good education, and he wanted to preserve that trust. But at the same time, this was the first time in his life that he'd had close friends he could rely on, and even the thought of losing the three of them was too painful to contemplate.

Lily Evans was a good friend, one of the rare Gryffindor girls who had any interest in him. Part of the reason why he'd ended up awake that night was the fact that she knew now, for a fact, what he was. She'd said she would still be his friend, but he didn't trust that, not really. It had taken him years to accept that James, Sirius and Peter wouldn't abandon him, and he was still afraid of it deep down. That was the reason why he always let them get away with it, the malicious things they did every now and then, because without them, he would have nothing and no one, and he couldn't bear that.

 _If you ever decide to keep some better company, you know where to find me_.

The thought made his spirits lift, just a little bit. Lily knew what he was, and she still offered friendship. None of the Gryffindor girls cared much for him, and Lily was always so friendly to everyone that he'd never felt like anyone special to her, because he remember how she'd treated Snape, back at the beginning, and he always thought that this was how she treated her closest friends, of which Remus wasn't. But maybe... maybe he could try, to be a little closer to her. She was a girl, a Prefect like he was, and she was separate from his circle of friends. He'd always wanted to be the type of person who had the courage to seek out many people, to have many friends, but he'd never dared, not since his father explained to him the first time why they'd have to move so often.

Maybe, at least with Lily, he could give that a try. She was always so nice, and now that she knew about the wolf... _maybe_ , a soft little voice in the back of his mind, sounding so much like his mother, said, _maybe you could be yourself with her, too_.

He fell asleep deliberating this point, and dreamt of what his life would have been like, had he never been bitten and cursed.

* * *

 **A/N:** The initial conversation between Lily and Severus is taken directly from _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_ , Chapter 33: The Prince's Tale.


	3. Ch I,2: The Extension of Untrusted Hand

**Chapter 2: The Extension of an Untrusted Hand**

Severus didn't trust Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, and if he were truly honest with himself, he also held a healthy dose of fear when it came to one of the two most powerful wizards of his time. He would have probably held just as healthy a dose of fear of the other of that pair, had he actually met the man who called himself Lord Voldemort, and no doubt would have spent years and years of his life rueing the moment he'd ever thought it a smart idea to serve that sadist. As it was, that Saturday morning, he had been summoned by Dumbledore, rather than Voldemort, and was now standing in front of the large doors that led into the Headmaster's office.

The man himself was seated at his desk, reading a copy of _Transfigurations Monthly_ and lightly sucking on what appeared to be some lemon-tasting candy, if the smell of the office was anything to go by. When Severus entered, the Headmaster lowered his magazine and eyed him with blue eyes over half-moon glasses.

"Mr Snape. Thank you for coming."

"You wanted to see me, Headmaster?" he asked wearily, standing in front of him.

"Take a seat, if you would, please."

Disliking the request, he nonetheless obeyed. The last time he'd been in this office was last month after that horrible night when Black had attempted to kill him, and he'd hoped never to step foot in it again. The disappointment had burned a hole in his stomach that night, and its pangs were making it cramp now.

No, Severus definitely didn't want to be here.

"I have had an enlightening conversation with a young lady of your acquaintance some days ago," the Headmaster began, and Severus' eyes widened fractionally as his thoughts shifted to Lily's enraged face and what the man might have done to her, that she'd not told him about. "She has, it seems, become aware of certain events." And here the Headmaster gave him a somewhat stern, lightly calculating look that had Severus wanting to shift in his seat.

"I apologise," he said, unable to keep the man's gaze and looking down at his own hands. "I didn't mean for her to find out. It just... slipped out."

"I am not upset with you about it, Mr Snape," Dumbledore answered. "You trust her to keep the truth to herself, do you not?"

"I... Yes, sir. Lily won't tell anyone, she promised me."

"Well, then, this particular matter is settled, and we shall leave it behind us."

Exhaling lightly, Severus got to his feet. "If that's all, sir–"

"No, Mr Snape, that is not why I had called you in here."

"Oh," he whispered, plopping down into the chair and eyeing the man through greasy strands of hair. What did the man want, then, if not to reprimand him for telling Lily?

"What I wished to discuss with you, Mr Snape, is something that Miss Evans brought to my attention. She has a great deal of trust in you, and she has confided some of her concerns in me about the path in life you wish to take."

Severus clenched his fists and jaw, anger bubbling up at those words. Lily had _no right_ to talk to Dumbledore about what he wanted to do with his life. It was his choice, and the last person he'd wanted to know anything about it was Albus bloody Dumbledore! Still, his fear of the man overrode his instinctive response to lash out, so that he remained seated and staring at his own lap stubbornly.

"She was also quite vocal about what she perceived as unjust punishment of Mr Potter and Mr Black for the incident that occurred between you and them three weeks ago. If I have given you an impression that I have chosen to favour them above you in this matter, then I apologise."

He... _what?_

Blinking in slight shock, Severus looked up into the blue eyes, which were solemn and without their customary twinkle. Lily had explained perfectly understandably what the Headmaster had told her a few days ago, but Severus wasn't very inclined to believe it. Yet, here he was, the most powerful wizard in Britain and beyond, _apologising_ to Severus, openly and solemnly.

"I had thought that you would understand why I had chosen to deal with this issue in the way I had. Miss Evans' impromptu visit had shown me that this was not the case. I assure you, Mr Snape, had the danger come from anyone other than another innocent student, I would have been much harsher in their punishments. However, in this case, you are not the only aggrieved party, and the consequences of something no doubt envisioned as a harmless prank would have been most severe on a young man afflicted with a terrible curse without his consent. Mr Lupin is not at fault here, you do see that, don't you, Mr Snape?"

"No, I don't," came out of his mouth before he'd even though it, so violent was the disagreement he felt on this. He gave the Headmaster a furious glare, that the old wizard matched with nothing but gravitas.

"How so? Mr Lupin had not agreed to Mr Black's plan beforehand, and indeed his very condition precludes him from being able to give consent after the fact."

"He told them what he is, didn't he?" Severus argued. "He told them where he goes every full moon."

"Did he tell _you_ that, as well?" Dumbledore asked, and Severus frowned in confusion. "Yet you, a Slytherin with whom he shares but a few classes, have figured it out with obviously far less information than his dormmates would have had to work with. The fact is, Mr Snape, that Mr Lupin had informed me of their knowledge three years ago, and I had spoken to Misters Potter, Black and Pettigrew at that time regarding the severity of Mr Lupin's situation. In three years, this is the first incident of the kind that has arisen from them being aware of Mr Lupin's lycanthropy."

It was so typical, Severus didn't even know why he'd bothered. Dumbledore would never see it Severus' way, would he, he'd always think better of his precious Gryffindors, just like he was implying now that it was Severus' fault, with all the unsaid things in that sentence that boiled down to Severus knowing Lupin's secret being what had caused the whole thing, so what was even the point of trying to argue with the man? No, it was better to just let him say what he wanted to say and get out as soon as possible, out of this office and out of any more interactions with the Albus sodding Dumbledore. So, Severus chose to only stare at the edge of the table as the old wizard's words washed over him, ringing in his ears and jarring all those unpleasant emotions that always came with thoughts of the Marauders.

"The decision to allow Mr Lupin attendance of this school in spite of his condition was mine, and I stand by it, because he is a bright young man who deserves to be educated just as every other wizarding child is. I have no doubt in my mind that he did not know of Mr Black's plans for that evening, because Mr Lupin has spoken to me at length about his concerns pertaining to his affliction and the dangers that come with it. Had I meted out harsher punishment, perhaps even expelled Mr Potter and Mr Black, their families would have gladly shifted the burden of blame onto Mr Lupin, and that would have been a certain death sentence for him. Would you truly wish to see him dead? A boy your age whose only crime was to stand by his only friends even as they did unjust and unpleasant things to others, because of his fear of losing said friendship? Would you be willing to shoulder the blame for his death, caused by your insistence that the other two boys be justly punished?"

He wanted to yell 'yes, it's what he deserves', but one look at the blue eyes that almost dared him to say it and the resolution not to engage the man any more had Severus keeping his mouth shut. Severus hated Potter and Black, yes, but the hatred he held for Lupin was a whole other brand of emotion; that half-breed had the gall to give Severus pitying looks while his friends tormented the Slytherin, all the while having the power to stop them and never saying a word. _That_ was a particular brand of cruelty Severus had not often run into, and it pained far more than physical ailments. So yes, he hated the Marauders, every single one of them, and spent many hours thinking of ways to hurt them or get some leverage on them so that they would leave him alone. Frankly, he thought the world would be a better place if they were dead. But he didn't want it to be his fault; he didn't want to have anyone's life on his conscience.

Severus was many things, but he wasn't a murderer, and what Dumbledore was saying sounded as if his choice was between appeasing Severus' need for justice or saving Lupin's life.

"Do you understand now why I chose do to what I did, and why I insisted you keep the incident to yourself? An innocent's life will always be more important to me than a man's pride."

 _Pride?!_

"It's not about pride," Severus spat, enraged by the very assumption to the point where he forgot his previous decision of silence. "It's about persecution and you turning a blind eye to it! Black tried to kill me, and he didn't even get a slap on the wrist for it!"

"Be honest, Mr Snape, and admit that some part of the blame lies with you," Dumbledore observed, eyes growing cold. "No one forced you to follow his instructions, and after five years of hostility, I see no reason why you trusted him with it at all. They may very well be persecuting you, but in this incident, the only one truly blameless is Mr Lupin."

"And what about every other incident?" Severus challenged, his temper getting away from him and making him say things he'd never wanted to say to this man. "What about every other time they attacked me, four-on-one? Why did you never do anything about that, if you knew they were doing it?"

"Did you ever report this abuse to anyone, Mr Snape? Your Head of House, or their Head of House? The school nurse? Some other professor? Me?"

He hadn't, actually, because Severus understood the underlying truth, the one his parents had taught him at the age of five: adults couldn't be counted on to help children. Besides, telling anyone about it implied that he was a defenceless wimp who couldn't deal with his own problems, and he would rather die than let anyone think that of him.

"Then you will understand why, in a school housing nearly a thousand students and staffed by less than fifty faculty, we cannot be aware of everything that happens in the hallways or the school grounds unless attention is brought to it, as Miss Evans had done with this case."

"Is that what you wanted to talk about?" the words burst out, and Severus jumped to his feet. "You wanted to tell me how it's all my fault that no one ever did anything about them?! That the only reason you even know who I am is because one of your precious Gryffindor prefects told you about me?!"

"Ah, don't forget Mudblood, Mr Snape," Dumbledore answered, seemingly unperturbed by the situation. "After all, Miss Evans is less worthy because of her parents."

"You're putting words in my mouth! I never said that!"

"Yes, you are correct, though I have to admit to being interested in your reasoning for it; you have had no problem using this term for every other Muggle-born."

"Lily is different."

"Yes, but why?"

Fuming, Severus stood in front of the Headmaster's desk with crossed arms and a glare almost powerful enough to burn through the table top. The man would never understand, and Severus had no intention of showing that much of himself to Albus Dumbledore; in some part of his mind, he did know there was no actual intellectual explanation why he felt the way he did. No, the reason was completely emotional – it was because Lily was the first person who'd ever wanted to be friends with him, who didn't insult him or belittle him, the first wizarding child he'd ever come across, and, over the years, she'd stuck by him when everyone else had turned out to be treacherous and unworthy of his trust. Lily was his friend, thus, Lily was different. End of story.

"What I am trying to show you, Mr Snape, is that Miss Evans is smart enough to come to this same conclusion herself; she will not appreciate being put above everyone else with similar background as her own because of your emotional attachment to her. It is your choice what to believe, and neither I nor anyone else could possibly change your beliefs if you are not amenable to those changes. However, I urge you to consider the consequences of these choices. They are what defines us, and it is because of this that we are responsible for everything that comes of those choices."

"What are you trying to say, then?"

"What I am trying to say, Mr Snape, is that the easiest way of losing those who are important to us is by refusing to consider how our choices impact them. Miss Evans is worried about you and about the company you keep. Does she have cause for this concern?"

"They're my housemates, and they aren't worse than hers. None of them tried to kill anyone."

"Ah, but would they, if given the chance? Would they find it morally wrong to harm or, as you've said, kill a Muggle-born who had, perhaps, grievously insulted them? And, more importantly, do you believe that harming and killing Muggle-borns and Muggles is a morally reprehensible act?"

Severus didn't answer, thinking instead that he simply couldn't figure out why the old wizard was telling him all this. Did he think that Muggles were less than wizards? Of course he did; they didn't have magic, which automatically made them less, but more than that stood out the fact that not a single Muggle had done anything to disabuse him of this notion. They were blind and stupid and completely oblivious to anything more going on in their lives, anything that didn't directly touch them or that wasn't easily explainable. Muggle-borns were hardly better; they held on stubbornly to their Muggle view of the world and pretended to be better than everyone else for holding that view.

That still didn't quite explain this train of thought the Headmaster was forcing on him, though. What in the world did Severus' beliefs have with the fact he'd told Lily about Lupin being a werewolf? What was the man playing at? Because there had to be an angle, Severus just wasn't seeing it.

"I'm not a murderer, and neither are my friends. Hanging out with them doesn't make me a murderer."

"Not now, but if you do choose to become a full-fledged Death Eater, it will."

"And maybe some people deserve to be dead!"

Dumbledore's eyes hardened. "If you truly believe that, Mr Snape, then you are free to go and find what you are seeking with Lord Voldemort."

Unable to hold his gaze, Severus instead hung his head to stare at his hands, as his mother's words from years past rang in his head, the ones that had been the response any time he mouthed off about their living circumstances and the way his parents treated him: _If you don_ _'_ _t like it here, then you_ _'_ _re free to go and find your own place to live_.

And just as his mother's words could so effectively sever him from surety and righteousness, so too did Dumbledore's now, echoing years and years of desperation and yearning in the deepest recesses of Severus' mind, for a mother who cared and a father who loved, for a home and a family that were safe and good, the desperation and yearning that sometimes seemed impossibly large to handle, and so were best kept boxed up and forgotten, because if there was one thing Severus had learned in his decade of childhood and adolescence, it was that hope for parents like Stephen and Monica Evans and a home like Lily's was futile, and only hurt.

He sat down into the chair, legs shaking so badly he couldn't stand any longer. His heart had climbed into his throat, and he hated that he couldn't understand why he was reacting in this way. He wanted to stomp his foot on the ground, say 'Thank Merlin someone's decided to let me be' and run out to find Lucius Malfoy, figure out how he could finally do what he'd wanted to do since the first time he'd heard of Lord Voldemort.

Except that Dumbledore's words rang out, over and over, in his mind. _The easiest way of losing those who are important to us is by refusing to consider how our choices impact them._ He knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that if he did declare himself publically for Voldemort's cause, he would be losing Lily. That was what had kept him back from becoming more active within the House of Slytherin.

He couldn't lose Lily. He just couldn't.

"If not death, what attracts you to the Dark Arts, Mr Snape? Why do you find yourself fulfilled by them?"

"Because I'm respected for it," he mumbled distractedly, unseeing as disjointed thoughts whirled in his mind. He hadn't felt quite this shaken since he was nine years old; he'd known how to shut down parts of his mind that screamed out his confusion and disagreement, parts that wished and hoped and yearned and begged, parts that made him vulnerable to anyone but Lily's green eyes (because that part, he just couldn't shut off, and he didn't even really want to try). He didn't know what this man, this wizard, whom he feared and secretly admired, just a little, what he wanted from him. He was sixteen years old, and in just one sharp sentence containing his mother's words but said in Dumbledore's voice, he was set suddenly utterly adrift, cut off from everything he'd held as a given just this morning, unable to anchor himself to ideas and people and worldviews. Half an hour ago, he had been able to do it, yet now, for all his effort, that clarity he'd had continued to elude him, and without it, he couldn't think straight.

He needed to get out of here, needed to find a quiet, safe corner to set his mind straight, needed to get away before the man did even more damage to him.

He was out of his chair, tripping on its leg and stumbling towards the door, when Dumbledore's voice bound him in place, like invisible strings.

"Tell me, Mr Snape, do you know what a Patronus is?"

Blinking, he turned back to look at the Headmaster wearily. There was no trace of anger or disgust on Dumbledore's face, just twinkly eyes and serene steadiness. Unable to help himself, Severus nodded jerkily once, then lowered his eyes when the feeling of those blue eyes burning his insides became too strong. The man's arms rested on the table top, wrinkled fingers intertwined.

"Yes, sir; we've learned the theory behind it this year in Defence."

He didn't know why he wasn't leaving, why he was still speaking to the man.

Perhaps it was because his mind had needed something else to grab hold of in order to focus again, and this was as good as anything else.

(Perhaps he was desperate for an adult to take care of his problems for once in his life, instead of having to face them alone, and Dumbledore was the only one seemingly willing to do it.)

"But you have not attempted to perform the spell?"

"No, I haven't," he answered honestly, forcing his mind to stay on topic, desperate to ignore the torrent of emotion the conversation had brought out in him so far.

Actually learning the spell had been well beyond N.E.W.T.-level curriculum until recently, and Severus personally held little interest in it. He though it slightly pathetic, this idea that _love_ and _devotion_ and _happiness_ could fuel magic. It seemed so... melodramatic, somehow, like those old over-the-top romance novels Lily's sister collected.

" _Expecto Patronum_."

Severus looked up in surprise, finding himself face to face with a magnificent slivery-blue phoenix that glowed almost alluringly. Their Defence professor had shown them his Patronus during class, of course, but it had been a rooster that hadn't left much impression on almost anyone. This Patronus, though... mesmerised, Severus reached out his hand to touch it, and his fingers didn't pass through, like he'd imagined they would, not at first. It was a half-solid thing, and when the very tips of his fingers came into contact with it, a ticklish sort of warmth spread through him, the one that made his stomach flip, the one he felt sometimes, when he and Lily were alone in stupid Cokeworth, sitting in their spot by the river and he could just listen to her talk and talk and talk about everything and anything.

The Patronus vanished, and Severus caught himself. Heat spread up his collarbone and over his cheeks, and he moved to glare at his treacherous hand. Was his body betraying him now as well as his mind? What in the world was _wrong_ with him?

"The Patronus is our physical manifestation of the good things in our life," Dumbledore stated, lowering his wand back on the desk. "As I am sure you've encountered during your long interest in the Dark Arts, intent is extremely important when casting. That, more than anything, marks magic as Light or Dark."

"Why is that important?" he asked, almost compelled by the leading words.

"Those who do not know pure happiness and love, they cannot produce a Patronus, Mr Snape. Lord Voldemort has to this day never produced one. This feature, I've found, more than any other, indicates the state of one's mind and the person's capacity for a good and fulfilled life. You are aware of another set of spells that require intense emotions, are you not?"

It sounded like a trick question, but Severus could not say why. He knew the answer, though, intimately.

"The Unforgivable Curses."

"Yes. The Unforgivables cannot be successfully cast without proper intent, and so the question becomes whether you possess the necessary intent to control, torture or kill another living being. I think you understand, Mr Snape, that you cannot have both. The cold-heartedness, the cruelty, that fuels the intent that is obviously needed for these curses when not driven by self-preservation, it is in direct opposition to the goodness and kindness that are needed to understand as deep an emotion as love."

"That doesn't mean one can't experience both," he protested.

"Yes, I agree. I stated 'understand', rather than 'experience', because, without understanding, there can be no use to any experience. A child that is burned by fire will simply repeat the experience if it does not understand that the fire is the cause of the pain. So is with love, as well. Worst of all, of course, are those who cannot even experience that. Lord Voldemort is one such person; he will not understand your devotion to young Miss Evans, should you join him, and that which we don't understand frightens us. What do you think he might do when he learns of your friendship?"

"My friendship with her has nothing to do with what he stands for."

"On the contrary, it has a great deal to do with it. He promotes a cause that Muggles should be ruled by wizards, and that Muggle-borns should not be mixed with Pure-bloods. The truth behind his agenda is a very selfish one – he wishes to be the most powerful wizard alive, and the only truly powerful wizards he has ever come across are Half-bloods, like he is."

" _What?_ " he shot out, so shocked that his head snapped up by itself, strands of greasy hair falling in his eyes. He pushed them away unconsciously, unable to tear his gaze from the Headmaster.

"Lord Voldemort was one of my students, thirty years ago. His true name is Tom Riddle, and until his maturity, he lived in a Muggle orphanage. His mother came from a very old Pure-blood family. His father was a Muggle."

"But... but they all say..." he stuttered as the world twisted on itself and fought to reorient to this bit of information. Lord Voldemort was not who he was claiming to be. He was just like Severus, with a witch for a mother and a Muggle for a father, claiming to be something he wasn't.

It felt like that changed everything.

"Yes, I am aware of the rumours concerning Tom's heritage. They are not incorrect; the Gaunt family was the last extant branch of the Slytherin line." So at least that part was the truth. "That does not negate the fact that his father was a Muggle, ignorant of anything wizarding, who had abandoned his mother once he learned of her deception. It does, however," Dumbledore continued, a little forcefully, as if he knew where Severus' thoughts were going, "undermine his main political line of belief. You know very well, Mr Snape, that most Pure-blooded wizards do not look much more highly on Half-bloods than they do Muggle-borns. How do you imagine they would behave once they learned of this truth?"

"They'd be resentful, probably."

"Yes, and the only thing truly keeping them with him would be fear. Fear that serves him, rather than the one that drives him, is something that Tom Riddle holds very dear, and it is, admittedly, a reasonably good strategy for keeping his followers in line. Fear that their families will be decimated, fear that they will be tortured, fear of things worse than death."

"Unless they didn't fear any of those things."

"Oh, we all fear something; even he, as powerful and alluring as he must seem to you and many others, even he fears. And he is well aware of this, I assure you; the one who relies on fear, he must always know to keep away from the point at which that fear changes from what haunts an individual to what drives them."

"How can fear drive anything?" Severus asked, unconsciously stepping back towards the Headmaster and the chair he'd vacated, lured in by the thoughts and truths being entrusted to him.

"When it comes true, Mr Snape. When what people have to lose is nothing, or _everything_. What would you do if you found yourself in a situation where you had to choose between Lord Voldemort and Lily Evans? Whom would you choose?"

Lily. Always Lily.

Dumbledore knew before Severus had uttered a single syllable.

"And this is why she is in danger, because she is your fear. Lord Voldemort cannot allow himself to be surrounded by individuals who do not share his mind fully, or who have nothing to lose, and believe me when I tell you that the moment he learns of this, young Miss Evans' life will be dependent on your obedience to him, forfeit should he so choose."

Falling into the chair, Severus stared unseeingly at the edge of the ornate desk for a long time, as he attempted to comprehend what the Headmaster had said. At some moments, he wanted to yell at the man and tell him that it didn't make sense, it didn't make sense because Voldemort wasn't just a power-hungry maniac, he was a man with a vision, for a better wizarding future. At others, Dumbledore's words clawed at his beliefs, taking root in his mind, as his Slytherin side grasped the underlying correctness in them, the base instinctiveness of control through fear.

Interspersed, Lily's words drifted back, _it_ _'_ _s Dark Magic_ , and _They do it because they_ like _it, how can you not see that?_ and _You_ _'_ _re worth it, Sev_. No one had ever told him he was worth their wrath, their anger, their peace, their safety. No one but Lily, who'd looked so stunningly beautiful that day, furious, eyes flashing and hair flying around her face, a perfect vision, and she was angry on his behalf.

He couldn't lose her, not ever. And Mulciber and Avery and Malfoy and the Blacks and all those other Slytherins who privately worshipped Lord Voldemort, who praised Severus for knowing dangerous, dangerous spells, who still secretly sneered down at him for his blood status when they thought he wouldn't see, they didn't think Lily was worth anything at all. To them, she was just another Mudblood Gryffindor, and if they were given the chance, he knew that they'd take it. That they'd hurt her without looking back. And if he displeased them, they'd do it to hurt _him_ , because that was how Slytherins thought, that was how Severus' whole world worked.

And so why would the Dark Lord be any different?

It was all well and nice when they attacked Mary Macdonald or some other Mudblood. But Lily was not something he would _ever_ risk, not ever. She was too good for that. But wasn't the very fact that she was his dearest friend risk enough, no matter what he wished?

And so, what other choice did he truly have, other than distancing himself from her? But that was beyond him, absolutely impossible. He was too selfish at his core to let her go, even if it were for her own good. The very thought was so painful it knocked the air out of his lungs.

"I understand that your position is precarious, Mr Snape," Dumbledore said gravely, leaning forward in his seat. "I understand your reluctance to declare yourself for either side. But, you must see that there will come a time when you will _have to_ declare yourself. I regret that you do not have the luxury many others do, of choosing to ignore the conflict or keeping out of it. But you are a reasonable young wizard, a _rational_ wizard, which is a rarity in our society, and so you see that, sooner or later, one side or the other will force you to choose. What will your choice be, then, between Lily Evans and Light, and Lord Voldemort and Dark?"

The answer was the same.

Lily. Always Lily.

And yet...

 _Would she even want me?_

He felt cold inside, felt like a part of him had frozen solid and he could not move, felt like his soul was torn in half. The last two years flashed through his mind, for the first time not obscured by his own self-doubts and adoration – the fights, the dismissals, the condescension, the persecution, the beliefs, the anger.

He might have already lost her, without even knowing it.

But no, that could not have been right; Lily, furious on his behalf, like an Erinys come to Earth, and _You_ _'_ _re worth it, Sev._

No, he had not lost her, but he was damn close to it, so close that he'd been feeling that dangerous edge even through his own wilful blindness.

Lily had her faults. If nothing else, then that last fight showed him this clearly. She had been swayed by her surroundings, in the same way that he had been swayed by his, and the direction she moved in was directly opposite to his own. So what if he did change his own path? He could only change it so much; Lily herself was the one who had to meet him halfway. Apologising for his deeds would not repair the rift between them, nor would it make the world suddenly better. What if he did all that, changed all that about himself, rejected all the certain possibilities in the Dark Lord's service, and she still didn't want him? What would he have left?

"Maybe it's too late," he said softly, blinking furiously behind his curtain of hair to chase the tears away. The laden weight of fear sat heavily in his chest, in his stomach, giving credence to Dumbledore's words. Losing Lily was his greatest fear. "Maybe I've already chosen a path, without even knowing."

"It is not too late, Severus," Dumbledore said gently, the name making Severus' breath catch in his throat. Lily was the only one who ever called him by his name, whether here or at home. He was Snape or Boy (or, sometimes, Son) to everyone else. Lily, and now the old Headmaster. "You can still make your choice."

"But what if I do all that and she still rejects me?" He looked up through his greasy locks, at the blue eyes that held compassion in them. "What if I make my choice and it's not enough for her? At least with the Dark Lord, I know the outcome."

Dumbledore sighed. "Uncertainty is the mark of love. Power is hungry; it takes indiscriminately. Voldemort will not turn you back if you approach him, that is true. And Miss Evans may still decide that she would rather no longer associate with you, even if you did choose her, that is also true. But would you rather try everything in your power and fail knowing that you have done all that could possibly have been done, or accept the easy way and one day regret not even trying?"

"I don't know," he whispered, finally fully facing the deepest truth. "I don't know."

"Think on this, Mr Snape, and when you have thought on it, come see me. Whether you find the answer you are looking or not, come see me."

And Severus understood yet another layer of cruelty he'd never experienced before, worse than the lack of love from those who were supposed to love you unconditionally, worse than persecution, worse than pity from those who could prevent it, the kind that made him understand that Dumbledore was one of the cruellest of them all – destroying every solid stance and thought Severus had, and not giving him anything else. The old wizard's words made him feel as if someone had pushed him out to sea and let him drift off alone, and Severus instinctively groped for some purchase, some hold, lest he be completely lost.

Even if it would come from the man who had inflicted this cruelty on him.

"The Patronus, you said that people who can experience love can produce a Patronus."

"Do you believe that you cannot experience love?" Dumbledore asked, lifting his eyebrows in light surprise.

"I thought I did. Before this conversation, I thought I did. I don't know anymore. Maybe I've got it all wrong. Maybe I can't be anything but Dark."

After all, if his love for Lily had so blinded him to the divide already gaping between them, then perhaps it wasn't truly love? Perhaps it was just an obsession, like his obsession with the Dark Arts and his obsession with Potions. Perhaps Lily was better off without him.

"Would you like me to teach you how to produce a Patronus?"

"I..." Rendered speechless, Severus stared at the man, even as he knew this was what he'd been reaching so desperately for. It was the surrealism of the situation – after five years of only peripheral contact with this man, fearing and admiring him for his power from afar, resenting him for his attitudes, Severus had come into this room as a wizard intent on a path that was in direct opposition to the one the Headmaster tread on, and now Albus Dumbledore was offering him personal tutorship in one of the most advanced charms in existence. And as much as his whole being yearned to simply take what was being given, Severus' old distrust and fear held him back, because only moments ago, this had not been on the table; this was not something freely given, but something offered in response to Severus' desperate plea. "Why?"

"Because I believe that you are not beyond reach, that you can yet choose the right path. And because the fact still stands that I have done wrong by you in last month's events, even if I do not regret my own resolutions."

"And you would not expect anything from me?" he asked, unable to reign in his suspicion that had kept him alive for so long.

"The only thing I expect from you in return, Mr Snape, is an honest answer to the question I have posed you, once you come to this answer. I only urge you to do it post haste, before the choice gets taken from you."

"You swear it?"

"I swear it. Do you accept my assistance?"

Severus swallowed, mouth suddenly dry. With startling clarity, he grasped that this was one of those pivotal moments in a person's life, when everything changed whether they liked it or not. Seeing Lily on that swing for the first time was one of those moments, and being sorted into Slytherin was another. He had to make a decision, and this terrified him.

He pushed through his own terror.

"I accept your offer to teach me the Patronus Charm."

Dumbledore's answering smile was a broad, warm one.

* * *

That night, Severus found himself unable to fall asleep, dizzying thoughts continuing to swirl in his mind and chase one another in maddening loops. His drapes were drawn, so he was kept from view of the other six boys in his year, and he'd gotten in the habit of casting silencing charms so that they wouldn't know what he was doing in the privacy of his own bed, but it didn't prevent him from hearing their many noises: Mulciber tended to snore when he was lying on his back, and Avery had an annoying habit of moaning in his sleep. Jonas wasn't much better, with his twisting and turning and nightmares all through the night, and Thistletwaithe suffered from sleep apnoea, which meant that he woke up at least three or four times throughout. Philes and Stone were quiet, at least, but the former went to bed ridiculously early and so was always awake at the crack of dawn, rustling book pages and parchments, while the latter couldn't be quiet when he prepared for bed to save his life, and he was always the last one to go to sleep. And, as much as Severus wished that he could block out their noises during the night, the very thought of being unable to tell what was going on beyond his green curtains made him feel itchy and uncomfortable.

That meant that, in cases such as this, when he couldn't easily fall asleep, he tended to remain awake all night.

Of all the things that had been plaguing him since the conversation with Dumbledore, all the things he'd managed or not managed to slot into place, one thought kept emerging back into his consciousness, the cause of his insomnia, the root of his fear: Lily wasn't perfect.

Until today, he'd never contemplated this. It was a fact in his mind, as unshakeable as stone, the very foundation of his concept of life, that Lily was perfect. Full stop. End of story.

He'd not given that much thought to it during his conversation with Dumbledore; the realisation that Lily was just as flawed as anyone else had been important only as a precursor to a more pressing matters, namely that of the potential consequence of him choosing to abandon his friends from Slytherin and the indecision that thinking had left him with. Now, however, in its continued torment of him, he understood that it was because this was, perhaps, one of the most fundamental blocks of his life, one of the most important foundation stones of his psyche, and it was utterly broken, making everything that rested on it teeter and sway, in danger of collapse.

Lily wasn't perfect. She wasn't the ideal friend and the ideal girl he'd always thought her as. She was a girl who was popular and who liked to be popular, and so she expected everything to fit into her neat picture of how things should work, that picture that was defined by what all of her numerous friends and acquaintances thought. She didn't understand just how difficult it was to balance his position in Slytherin, and she didn't understand just how stifling it was to have four hostile students breathing down his neck all the time. And yes, he very well gave as good as he got, but that still didn't mean that he wasn't at a disadvantage, if for nothing else, then for being ganged up on four to one.

He remembered just how far his stomach had fallen, when he'd told her about that horrible night and she'd turned it right back on _his_ friends and their behaviour, as if the very fact that he could have been so easily harmed or killed by a raging werewolf wasn't even worth her notice. And the silence after that, the lost way in which she'd stared at him, as if she'd honestly not been able to weigh those things out, as if the idea of killing another student simply wasn't something she would ever dwell on, when she had thought so much on her own distaste for some nastier potions and curses...

That moment, though soothed by her later ire, had nonetheless cut his heart into little ribbons, had hurt him more than he could remember anything hurting, except maybe the first time he realised that his father didn't love him, when he was five and the man had told him his life would have been so much better without Severus in it. He'd felt devastated, yes, but more than that, he'd felt disappointed, because until that moment, he'd thought that if there was one person in the world who would never disappoint him, it would be Lily, and there she'd been, doing exactly that. And he couldn't forget it, couldn't put it away like so many countless other little things he'd been able to, over the last two years, because that, right then, that was the moment of impact, that had obliterated something he'd held to be a fundamental truth, and everything, everything that had come before it, freed now by Dumbledore's unconscionable actions, only served to hammer it painfully in even more, now in the dead of night – the way she dismissed his concerns about the Marauders; the way she always brought up her distaste for his friends, even if he mentioned them only in passing; the way she admonished him whenever he so much as hinted at Dark Magic.

When was the last time that she'd been genuinely positive about anything in his life? Not his parents, not his friends, not his interests, not his schooling, nothing.

Except, _you_ _'_ _re worth it, Sev_ , like none of that had even occurred to her, like she didn't even know just how much she didn't see that worth, either.

With a snarl, Severus jumped out of his bed and ran for the exit to this stifling place, almost tripping over his own feet. He needed to breathe, properly breathe, like he'd not done since who knew when. Needed to escape his own treacherous mind and his own disappointments.

He'd never crossed the way between the Slytherin quarters and the Hogwarts entrance so quickly, or so blindly, but then he was out, in the frigid March air, gulping breath after deep breath and trying to keep himself from falling apart at the thought that Lily wasn't who he'd imagined her to be, who he had believed her, so wholly, to be. Wasn't whom he needed her to be, for his own sanity.

That she was perhaps a complete stranger to him, a figment of his imagination.

And yet, even now, when he thought about Dumbledore's question, whom he'd choose, the answer was unchanged, in spite of everything he'd come to realise – always Lily. And he wished he could hate her, for the power she had over him, wished that he could tear himself away and be free. He didn't even try, because deep down, in his very core, feeling it viscerally and unconsciously, he knew his own fear of untetheredness, fear of being adrift and absolutely, completely alone, and knew Lily and his belief and trust and everything else for her, what made her such an important building block of his world, was the only thing standing between him and the Abyss.

"You all right?" a quiet voice asked, making him whirl in his step and reach for the wand that he'd forgotten in his bed.

The boy beside him was a familiar one, dark-skinned and long-faced, with closely-cropped hair favoured by the Muggle population far more than the wizarding one. Michael Stone. A fellow fifth-year Slytherin.

"What the hell do you want?" he shot back, feeling far too vulnerable in front of the other boy.

"I saw you run out," the boy said quietly. "It's almost the full moon, and who knows what's in the Forbidden Forest these days."

Severus gave him a sharp look, but the boy didn't seem like he knew about Lupin.

"Have trouble sleeping?"

"You can go con someone else," Severus told him, crossing his arms over his chest to ward off the chill; he was in his nightclothes, and with every second that passed, the Scottish cold slowly chilled him more and more.

"No conning this time, promise," the boy said with a grin, pearly-white teeth glinting under the waxing moon. "Look, I saw your... friend's... outburst, a few days ago; she seemed pretty enraged about something. Just wanted to check if you're all right."

"Why would you care?" Severus asked, a little incredulous; he and Michael Stone had never exchanged more than a few words.

In response, the boy shrugged and looked out towards the Forbidden Forest.

"I grew up with my father, in London," the boy began, sounding almost thoughtful. "My mum comes and goes, but she's not the type to be tied down. Dad loved her anyway, made sure she always had a place of normalcy to come back to from her crazy magical adventures. He was older than her, nearing fifty when I was born. All he dreamed about was getting to sixty and retiring. Never J-walked, never stole a single thing, followed all the rules. He died almost three years ago, three days shy of sixty. Heart attack. He was there, then he wasn't. And all those rules he followed, all they got him was stress and more stress, until he fell over and never got up." He turned his head back and met Severus' eyes with a shrug. "You wanna know why I care? Because it's the descent thing. Important thing. No one ever cared about my father in the Muggle world, not really. The only one who ever cared was my mother, and she still does enough to come home during summer hols so that I don't get shuffled off to an orphanage. Maybe if someone other than her had, my dad would still be alive. So, are you all right?"

"I... yeah, fine," he answered distractedly, trying to figure out the purpose of this little talk and coming up empty. Why the boy had shared so much of his personal life like it was nothing, like it wasn't ammunition someone could use against him one day, he didn't know.

But, as he watched the boy slip back into the castle in the silence of the witching hour, Severus found himself finally breathing normally. Whatever else, Lily cared, and that was what was truly important to him. When it counted, Lily came through for him, and he clung to that through everything else, finding faith within himself to believe that she may not be perfect, but that she was good enough nonetheless.

Finding strength to begin building, painstakingly slowly, something new and better and stronger out of the rubble of the old.


	4. Ch I,3: The Wrestle with Futility

**Chapter 3: The Wrestle with Futility**

"Ah, Severus. Come in," the Headmaster's voice called as Severus hesitantly opened the door to the man's office on Friday evening. He'd expected to find him at his desk, but this time, Dumbledore was sitting in an ugly wing-backed chair next to the fireplace, a cup of tea hanging in the air within easy reach. He appeared to be reading a book, though he did put it down when Severus closed the door behind him. "Have you given any thought to our last conversation?"

"Yes, sir," he muttered, moving to stand awkwardly in front of the old wizard.

"Do sit down; would you like some tea?"

"Er... no, thank you."

"Perhaps a sherbet lemon?"

"That's all right," he said, feeling completely off kilter. Since when did the Headmaster offer tea and sweets to _him_?

"Tell me, have you come to any realisations in the past week?"

"Not really." He was not willing to get into this, and the man had promised him time; Severus didn't want to lose his temper, it wouldn't be conductive to the beginning of the evening, but he felt harassed and very, very uncomfortable. Throughout his almost five years of schooling, Dumbledore had always been the unapproachable disciplinarian. He was acting like someone's grandfather, and Severus did not like it in the least.

"No matter. Tell me, what do you know of the Patronus Charm?"

And thus began their lesson. They went over the theory in detail, much more than their DADA professor had done with them this year; it looked simple on the surface, a circular motion of the wand and the _Expecto Patronum_ incantation. Underneath, though, it was anything but. The magic required not only positive emotions, but _steady_ emotions; the silvery construct was the memory personified, fed by one's magic entwined fully with the emotions behind the memory. Most of their spells so far hadn't needed such synchrony between the magic and the feeling, but Severus was familiar enough with the concept through his numerous forays into Dark Magic. The main difference lay in the fact that where Dark Magic only required the _presence_ of emotions, the Patronus Charm required _control_.

Dumbledore had him sit and think for some minutes about his happy memories, and he quickly got frustrated with it. He knew which ones, of course; that time Lily had fallen asleep with her head on his shoulder two years ago, or the first time he'd managed to successfully create his very own custom potion, a simple colour-changing addition to his ink, back in second year; the day his mother had taken him to buy his wand, which was now battered enough that he was seriously considering buying a new one (while it did still work, Severus felt the cracks in the wood under his fingers, from the night Black had tried to kill him, and he had no doubt that overloading it would result in some very bad consequences; unfortunately, he was light on money, and he knew that he'd have to get home and filch some from his father for it), or the first and last truly happy Christmas, when he'd stayed at Hogwarts because his parents had been arguing so badly his mother had told him not to come home, and Lily had stayed with him.

The problem was that pulling up these memories wasn't easy; he felt wistful about them, longing, but he could barely remember how he'd felt during those times, and he knew that he'd need to, if he wanted to succeed.

To say that his first attempts at casting it that night were lacking would be a gross understatement. Nothing happened, and with each try he got more and more frustrated, until Dumbledore put a stop to it and forced him to sit down with a cup of tea in his hands, silently fuming and more than ready to escape the room.

"This is not an easy spell to cast," Dumbledore said, observing him over his half-moon glasses. "And it will take time."

"It's ridiculous," he rebuked, just about ready to be done with it. He drained his tea in one gulp and placed the teacup down. "I don't know why I'm wasting my time with this."

Dumbledore lifted an eyebrow at him.

"I believe we both know why that is. However, I suggest you spend some time finding stronger memories, and patience. This will not come to you as easily as potion brewing does."

He growled under his breath and got up. "Good night, Headmaster."

"Good night, Severus."

And the man persisted in calling him by his first name, which Severus quickly learned to hate, because every single time, it knocked him off-kilter, made him unsteady for just a moment or two, and he didn't think he could afford that sort of inattention.

He met with Dumbledore three times the following week, with less than stellar results – the evenings followed what was quickly becoming a pattern, wherein he came to the old man's office, refused the offer of sweets and/or tea, tried to think of his happiest memories, utterly failed in producing anything, and left considerably more frustrated and angry than he'd been before.

On Friday of the second week, Mulciber and Avery cornered him in the hallway between the Common Room and their dormitory and demanded to know where Severus was scampering off to.

"Why do you care?" he sneered at the larger boy, shouldering past him into their dormitory.

"You sneaking about at all hours of the evening, no one knows where you end up? Why do you think?"

"How is it any different from what I always do?"

Avery gave him an ugly, knowing smile; those two had been supposed best friends since early childhood, as their fathers were business partners, and after being sorted into the same house, they'd stuck together. Or, more precisely, Avery stuck by Mulciber. Of the two, Cain Mulciber was far larger, having bulked up before other boys in their year, and he was the ringleader; Terence Avery, a far smaller presence, was usually to be found in his shadow, so that many people thought him to be far more harmless. Severus knew better, of course; while Avery rarely acted without Mulciber in anything, he was smart as a whip, and about as nasty as Slytherins came if crossed. Mulciber, by contrast, was more dangerous on the physical front, but he was definitely on the lower end of the average intelligence.

"Usually we know where you end up."

It was a bluff; it couldn't have been anything else, really. Mulciber and Avery had connections throughout their House, as they were already part of the influential upper-year group that would be joining Voldemort as soon as they were fully trained, which meant that they could boss around certain lower-years to their whim, but Severus knew all of the other Slytherins those two had contact with, and knew how to evade them when necessary. It was simply a part of Slytherin life, really, one he'd been introduced to all the way back in his first year.

When Severus had arrived at Hogwarts, the big influential groups of Slytherins (male and female, and even though they tended to intermingle to an extent, they nonetheless had their own distinct spheres) had been led by seventh-years Lucius Malfoy and Kyla Slora, who'd seen to it that Severus was included in those initial bonding moments that formed between wide-eyed, impressionable eleven-year-olds – the influence of teens that seemed like adults to first-years was something that had long existed within Slytherin, a House that had learned to band around their own from the very first day. As the years had gone one after another, the leadership of this group had transferred regularly until now it was Evan Rosier and Fiona Selwyn that held these titles. These days, both Mulciber and Avery were tight with Rosier; additionally, Avery's older sister Wysandria was close to Selwyn, whose father was known as a Death Eater in most circles.

Even so, there was no way they could have been consistently spying on him, or else there would have been far more interested in the various things he'd been inventing for the past few years – most days, if he wasn't spending his time with Lily, he was testing his spells and potions in unused rooms, and if they'd known that, they would have demanded that he share everything with the top Slytherins long ago (he shared certain inventions and knowledge, of course, but there was a balancing act to be done in this arena – share enough to impress them, but not so much as to become the centre of attention).

Still, the very thought that they'd become curious enough to perhaps attempt to spy on him was chilling.

"Really?" he asked Avery, adopting the other boy's ugly expression. "But all you had to do was ask. If I'd known you were so interested in my wanking techniques, Aves, I'd have made it easier on you by far."

Avery's expression twisted into an ugly, angry thing as Mulciber barked out a laugh, shaking his head.

"We know you better than that, Snape. You shaggin' that Mudblood?"

Severus almost saw red, and only long practice of suffering similar insinuations kept him from hexing Mulciber to oblivion; they'd never come out and asked him about Lily, but now it came to him that they _did_ know he was friends with her, well enough that he should have expected this.

"Sod off, Mulciber," he snapped at the bigger boy, narrowing his eyes. "Or else I might just get some of those eager little lapdogs of yours to trail _you_ for a change, maybe report to Avery here what you've been up to with his sister."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Avery demanded sharply.

"I guess that wasn't very clear, then, was it? That was supposed to mean 'mind your own bloody business'!"

He yanked the curtains of his bed shut and raised his usual wards, making certain that the other boys could neither hear him nor approach him, even though being so closed up made his skin crawl and his mind bang in a hundred different directions as he tried to wrangle his impotent rage at the very thought that they could _desecrate_ –

Violently, he pulled out his _Advanced Potion-Making_ , his mother's old textbook, and forced himself to focus on N.E.W.T.-level potions, even though there were so many other O.W.L.s he had to prepare for instead. But, potions required precision, patience and concentration, and studying them was the best way for him to shut off his mind to everything that he didn't know what to do with and give himself some respite.

It didn't help him get any sleep, though, because the thought of Mulciber outright asking him about Lily was more than a little unsettling; he'd worked hard to keep the impression that he was friends with her more for their study sessions than for any other reason, and if any of them stumbled onto the truth...

And now that they were sniffing about his private lessons with Dumbledore, he was in double danger. If they figured out whom he was meeting, they'd think he'd turned on them, and there would be hell to pay. But he _needed_ to master this charm, needed to accomplish this one thing, so that he could finally stop being so torn into a thousand directions.

And his relationship with Lily wasn't any better, either. He found himself worrying about their interactions when they occurred, because since his talk with the Headmaster ( _the easiest way of losing those who are important to us is by refusing to consider how our choices impact them_ ), it came to him that everything in his life had over the years become tied to her, and one little misstep could cost him dearly, and, damn it, he could not lose Lily, so even the possibility of Dumbledore's words being truth couldn't be ignored. Which meant that he couldn't stop overthinking every single one of his actions, which seemed to put Lily on guard until she withdrew even further, and he was left scrambling for a solution to fix it, which only made him think even more. It was a vicious circle that he had no clue how to break, and it was driving him insane, because he used to be good at compartmentalising his emotions, something that had come quite naturally to him until recently, but that he now couldn't do to save what little sleep he might have managed to catch, and, even worse, he suspected that he wouldn't be able to do it in the future, either.

And even though he felt wrung out in as many ways as was possible, his anger wouldn't loosen its grip on him, because the more tired he became, the more things around him frustrated and annoyed him, and the more those fuelled his anger, until it was all he could do to not be snapping at Lily, let alone the Headmaster or his housemates.

On Tuesday of the third week of his training, he seriously considered simply skipping, and only his inborn stubbornness pushed him to show up at the Headmaster's office, though his temper was bordering on explosive.

So perhaps it wasn't so surprising that he couldn't even conjure up a single memory of Lily, even on his first try.

Utterly enraged, Severus found himself clenching his fists so tightly that his whole arms ached, and his magic rose inside without control, finding the outlet in the various knick-knacks in the office and venting out on them, sending them flying off the shelves and exploding in what had be a spectacular sight, until the whole office was littered with glass shards, torn books, burned papers and melted metal.

When the episode exhausted itself, Severus wanted to be swallowed by the earth from his humiliation, or at least run away from the scene of destruction and simply never surface again. Raging against the injustice inflicted upon him was one thing; losing his temper like a little child was quite another.

"Severus, sit down," Dumbledore said softly, and Severus' body obeyed without his input, dropping into the ugly chair and beginning to shake in the aftereffects of expelling so much magic.

"I... apologise," he murmured, burying his eyes in one hand; the other unclenched only slightly, to relieve the stabbing sensation in the palm.

"There is no need for it," Dumbledore answered. His magic hummed in the air, and the things Severus had smashed to bits began mending themselves back into their original forms. "You are not the first, and I daresay not the last, student to lose their temper in this office; nothing here is irreplaceable, and quite a few things are easily mendable." When he was finished, he tucked his wand away and leaned forward in his seat. "Now, then, I think perhaps we need to change our approach."

"It's completely pointless," Severus muttered, feeling like an utter failure. "I can't do it."

"That is certainly not my belief."

"Then what _is_?"

"What many who hold an affinity for the Dark Arts experience – you do not understand your own emotions enough to be able to deal with them."

"I'd been doing fine until _you_ came along with your speech on picking sides and what would Lily think," he spat back.

"No, Mr Snape; what you were doing is called Occlusion, something very few wizards and witches are naturally inclined towards. You were able to section off your emotions and put them out of your mind, but that is by no means dealing with them. Perhaps 'deal' is not an appropriate word. Process them would be better, I should think. It is one thing to, as is the Muggle phrase, sweep them under the mat, and quite another to work through them in order to grasp the reason for their existence."

"Then what do you suggest?"

"Put away your wand, Mr Snape; you shall not be using it for the rest of the evening."

Severus unclenched his hand and found, to his horror, that his wand was cracked deeply at the handle. After everything else tonight, he couldn't deal with that, not right now, so he put his wand carefully in his pocket and fought not to think about what that meant for him in the coming months, because not only were the O.W.L.s coming, but he _needed_ to have a functioning wand to defend himself against Potter and his cronies.

"Now, then," Dumbledore said when Severus finally gave him as much of his attention as he could muster. "Could you tell me what it is that is bothering you?"

It was such an absurd question, Severus didn't know _what_ to say. So he just stayed quiet and stared at the old wizard in a way he hoped conveyed his thoughts on the matter. Dumbledore, obviously able to read it, smiled lightly.

"I meant this evening; is there anything that has arisen since our last meeting?"

The easiest way to get out of this line of questioning was to give the Headmaster something, and when he thought on it for a moment, he realised that Dumbledore _was_ right, at least in asking whether there was something specific that he could help with.

So he told Dumbledore about his encounter with Mulciber and Avery, and the increasingly suspicious looks he was getting from the rest of the Slytherins who knew him, in connection with his evening sessions with the Headmaster.

"I will devise a cover story for us, one that will stand the inspection of your housemates," Dumbledore promised when he was done. "Is there anyone in your House whom you would trust to not betray anything, should I approach them?"

Severus' first instinct was to say no, but then the memory of that first night of his arrangement with Dumbledore came back to him. The dark-skinned boy with pearly-white teeth and shortly cropped hair, and his: _You wanna know why I care? Because it_ _'_ _s the descent thing. Important thing._

In the end, it was the easy way in which the boy had revealed his story, about a loving, too-early-deceased Muggle father (such an alien concept to the son of a hate-filled drunkard), giving Severus so much leverage over himself, that decided it for the Slytherin.

"Michael Stone. If there is anyone, it'd be him."

"Ah, Mr Stone. A Half-blood like you, if I remember correctly."

"Yes," Severus said through gritted teeth. "But that's not why. Jones is also a Half-blood, but I wouldn't trust him dead; he hates all of us. Stone's..." But how could he explain to the Headmaster something so complex as the types of Slytherins that existed within the school? "Trustworthy," he finished in the end.

"Very well; we will speak with him and come to an arrangement that will suit our purposes."

"And his," Severus reminded the man. "You're dealing with a Slytherin; he'll want something."

"Yes, of course. Now, tell me, Mr Snape, do you feel any closer to the answer that I had asked of you when we made our arrangement?"

"I–" Severus stalled, momentarily caught unawares; Dumbledore had not asked him that since their first session, and with everything else Severus had truly almost forgotten about that. So, what came out was the truth, rather than any misdirection or prevarication. "No. I... I don't know."

Dumbledore leaned forward in his chair, resting his forearm on the armrest and twining his wrinkled fingers together.

"I implore you to be careful, Severus; I will do all I can to protect you for as long as our meetings continue, but I cannot prevent them from pushing you into making your choice any more than I can offer you the clarity you seek on the matter. What you have is but a reprieve, and it will end."

"What do you want from me?" Severus asked defensively, learning back in his seat and away from the old wizard.

"Only that you be honest with yourself. Do you truly wish to learn the Patronus Charm or not? Because I believe that you have now gained sufficient insight into the complexity of Light Magic to understand why half-hearted efforts will not give you what you seek. If you truly wish to master the Patronus Charm, then you need to face your emotions properly, both those that are ruling you now, and those that are obstructing your happy memories. Do you have the strength of character for that?"

Severus didn't know about that. What he knew was that he'd come too far to quit now, because there was no going back to the way things had been three weeks ago. The only way he saw was forward, and Severus was many things, but a coward was not one of them.

And, perhaps Dumbledore was right, in a way. His encounter with Mulciber and Avery had been just another shitty thing on top of all the others, and speaking about it, his only goal tonight had been to have the Headmaster find a way of helping him handle it, but now that he'd actually voiced his troubled thoughts on the subject, Severus felt as if a weight had fallen off his shoulders, at least for the immediate future. The fact was that, as much as he'd learned to live with it, anger was tiring in the extreme, and Severus did have moments (now increasingly frequent ones, since his attempts at learning the Patronus Charm began) of wishing that he was rid of it. Perhaps Dumbledore could help him with that, too, the way he'd helped him with the issue of covering for these meetings.

The most important question, then, was whether he trusted Headmaster Albus Dumbledore enough to give him that much insight into his personal thoughts. And for that, Severus simply had no answer, because while his mistrust had cooled somewhat, he was far too cautious by nature to give his trust freely, and in such short a time.

It was a tricky situation, but maybe not an unsolvable one.

"I'll try," he answered the old wizard's question, knowing Dumbledore well enough by now to know that he'd understand the nuances behind those short words.

"Very well. Now, there is something I wished to discuss with you, and now seems a good a time as any." A little weary, Severus nodded in acquiescence; Dumbledore had never tried to have any sort of meaningful conversations with him before that didn't pertain to the Patronus charm in some way, so he wasn't quite certain what to expect. "Tell me, Severus – you've had the Careers Advice session with Professor Slughorn – have you given any thought to your professional future past Hogwarts?"

Of all the things that weighed on him, from his indecisive allegiances to his shaky friendship with Lily, from the fucking Marauders to the bloody Slytherins, from his home life to his feelings for these sessions and the Headmaster, _this_ was the one topic that Severus hadn't expected, and that was not only benign by comparison, but also something he felt comfortable speaking of.

He relaxed a little and nodded.

"Yes, sir. Professor Slughorn explained roughly which O.W.L.s would be most beneficial for what I might wish to do later on."

"And that is?"

"I like potion-making," he admitted, though that was relatively common knowledge. "And I enjoy combative magic."

"Defence Against the Dark Arts; I do regret that we cannot attain stability with regards to that subject. I assume your interest in the Dark Arts falls in this category?"

"I... yes, sir," he said, deciding to gamble on the truth. Dumbledore knew of his interest in the Dark Arts, and so far, he'd not said much against it. Prevaricating would be counterproductive, and there was a good part of him that wanted to push the old man and see how far he could take it, too. "I think knowing the Dark Arts helps me understand Defence better."

It also helped him defend himself from Potter and his cronies, but he wasn't going to mention that.

"Do you feel you have more of an interest in the application of these skills, or in furthering them through research and invention?"

"Research," he said definitively; that was one thing he had no problems deciding. "I mean, I know that simple application should be good enough to keep me comfortable with regards to money later on, but I've already invented some spells, and there is a ton of improvements I've made over the standard preparation of most potions in our curriculum."

"Indeed? Would you, perchance, be willing to share some of your spells with me?" Dumbledore asked with a smile, his eyes twinkling almost madly behind his half-moon glasses. "I do admit that at my age, one has seen most of the commonly, and quite a few uncommonly, used magics, and any new one is a treat."

"I... yes, sir," Severus said, blinking in surprise and grasping for the first spell to cross his mind. "I made up a privacy spell; it doesn't create a sound vacuum like most of the other ones, but gives you a buzzing sound in your ears when you step close to it, so it's much less noticeable unless people are expecting it and listening for strange noises. Though it works better in a crowd, as it can be hidden in the cacophony there."

He pulled out his wand carefully, gripping it in a way he hoped would protect the crack from expanding, and cast a _Muffliato_ around himself. Thankfully, his wand performed with only a little more difficulty than it had before, and he prayed some magical glue would hold the wood together until he got enough money to afford himself another wand.

Dumbledore stood up and walked towards him, and Severus began listing the ingredients to the Felix Felicis potion out loud, to demonstrate the effect of the spell. The delighted expression on Dumbledore's face as he experimented with the spell made something warm and stubborn, tinged with pride, unfurl in Severus' chest. He removed the spell and showed the wand movement and pronunciation carefully, and Dumbledore preformed it perfectly on the first try, looking almost decades younger throughout the whole thing.

It was absolutely surreal, Severus actually _teaching_ Albus freaking Dumbledore something, that he felt excitement rise in his chest against his will, making him wish to tell the Headmaster about all the other things he'd come up with over the years. And Dumbledore's face was so open and attentive that he couldn't resist the temptation, and launched into a detailed explanation, first of this spell, and then some of the other ones, so that, by the time he'd wound down a little, at least an hour had passed.

"This is truly extraordinary, Severus," Dumbledore said when he'd finished, looking like he meant every one of those words. "You should consider continuing in this manner in a professional direction. I am not a potioneer by any stretch, of course, but speaking as a transfiguration master who has been researching and inventing magic for decades, it would be a loss to the magical world if you did not further your interests on this matter."

"I want to, truly, but I don't think Professor Slughorn would agree with it," Severus said, wilting a little at the reminder of yet another of those inconvenience he was forced to suffer on a daily basis. "I've asked him to allow me the use of one of the small laboratories, but he didn't seem open to the idea at all. And he is the only potions master I know; if he doesn't give me a good recommendation, then I am unlikely to be accepted for Potions Mastery, and no one wants to buy potions from people who don't have the credentials to assure quality."

"Horace is not unreasonable, though between you and me, he is a little hard-headed," Dumbledore agreed. "Perhaps your performance on the O.W.L.s will be convincing enough in showing your mastery of the subject."

Severus doubted it; Slughorn played favourites depending on how he perceived people's monetary situation, appearance, magical competency, and, above all, allegiance. The man was a Slytherin, all right; he kept to his stance of neutrality, but it was quite obvious to anyone willing to look that he was against Lord Voldemort's ideas, and so he shunned most of the students who showed tendencies towards that political stance, unless they had other things to recommend them (such as the Black family did).

"I don't think so; he doesn't change his mind very often."

"Yes, but there have always been exceptions," Dumbledore assured him. "My advice would be to prepare for your O.W.L.s as best as you can, and perhaps things will look different afterwards."

While a part of Severus had hoped for a little more than platitudes, he wasn't too disappointed either way; after all, no matter how much Dumbledore seemed to be willing in helping him, Severus knew his favouritism of students did not show in any sort of academic privilege, and that was exactly what getting Slughorn to like Severus would be, after all these years. Still, the enthusiasm the Headmaster had shown for Severus' dabbling in research and invention was more than enough to carry him through until bedtime, and for the first time in months, he fell asleep without too much struggle, sleeping deeply and without any dreams to disturb him.

The next day dawned just a little brighter than the one before.

* * *

"Hey, mind if I sit here?"

Looking up from her book, Lily greeted Remus with a smile, scooting on the bench so that he could sit beside her; Saturday mid-morning, the Great Hall was mostly empty, and Lily liked the openness of it when the days were bright and clear, as was the case today. Usually, she and Severus studied either in a corner of the library or some unused classroom, where they'd not attract much attention, but since the tension between them had not only not abated, but actually risen in the last three weeks, Lily had started seeking out more public places to avoid as much of the discomfort as possible.

"You preparing for the O.W.L.s?" Remus asked her, tugging his bag into his lap to rummage through it.

"Yes; really, why do we even need to learn Astronomy?" she complained with a roll of her eyes. "Honestly, the most I've ever gotten out of it was an easier way of sleeping through History of Magic that one year we had them on consecutive days. I mean, I understand the importance of it in Potion-making and Alchemy, but do we _really_ need to spend _five years_ studying it? I could have learned half of this from a Muggle astronomy atlas and saved myself years of lack of sleep. And have you noticed how unconnected all of our curriculum is? Professor Slughorn only introduced the importance of Astronomy this year, when we've been studying it from the start, and now I've forgotten half of the things I needed to know for Potions!"

She took a breath to continue the tirade and in the momentary break finally noticed Remus' bemused expression.

"Too much?"

"Well... maybe a little," he agreed.

"I'm sorry, Sev's usually the one who takes the brunt of my ranting," she admitted with the heat of embarrassment in her cheeks. "I tend to forget myself."

"Yes, I'd noticed that," Remus said with a smile, opening his own textbook. Lily, who'd been expecting a comment on Severus, found herself pleasantly surprised when he instead asked: "So, are you studying Astronomy, then?"

"Oh, no, I'm too upset about it to study it just now. I'm reviewing Ancient Runes. You?"

"Charms. I thought, since you're best in our class..."

"Of course," Lily said instantly, putting aside her Ancient Runes book to grab her Charms textbook. "What do you need help with?"

They took a few hours to work through some of the more difficult spells, and Lily found that she quite enjoyed a change in pace with regard to her study partners. Severus was usually ill-tempered when he didn't understand something, and tended to brood on things until he got them. He also often disliked her attempts to clarify things, seeing them as condescending or some such rot. By contrast, Remus was far more easy-going and listened to her explanations, even connecting them to some of the other knowledge he had and telling her about it, so that by lunchtime, Lily felt like she'd actually managed to gain new insight into charmwork, a tall feat for someone to whom this aspect of magic came so naturally.

He ate lunch with Potter, Black and Pettigrew, leaving Lily to chat with Mary, Bettina and Clotilde. As was the case these days, they ended up speaking of the O.W.L.s, with Clotilde sharing her experiences with them from the previous year. Lily wasn't too worried about the exams; she was a good student overall, and even her talk with Professor McGonagall regarding career planning couldn't shake her confidence in her knowledge base. She was still undecided about what she wanted to do in the future – charmwork was something Lily not only excelled at, but also adored, and her first career choice for several years now had been Charms Mastery. Professor McGonagall had muddied the waters by suggesting that she also prepare for a second option, and Lily's only other thought had been Auror Training, as, considering this covert war with You-Know-Who was only looking to get worse, and it was specifically targeting people like her – Muggle-borns and Muggles – she felt that she had a moral obligation to help after finishing Hogwarts. But that would mean expanding her already relatively thorough list of N.E.W.T. subjects she was going to take.

After lunch, expecting the girls to go on ahead, Lily took her time checking if she had everything for today's study session with Severus before leaving the Great Hall. This was why finding Mary hovering by her elbow startled her so much. The other girl offered her a small, apologetic smile.

"You didn't go with them?" Lily asked her.

"No. I, ah... I wanted to ask you if you could help me," Mary said. Pale and blue-eyed, Mary Macdonald had a beautiful head of chocolate-coloured hair that she usually kept braided over one shoulder, and it was that sort of thick braid that was very simple but tended to look extremely intricate due to its enormous volume. Mary was the quietest of the four of them, making those who didn't know her consider her shy, though she was under the surface very firm in her opinions, and her silences tended to speak more than her words ever did.

And ever since Mulciber's attack on her right after Christmas hols, when he'd attempted to use some sort of Dark curse on her that produced inaudible sounds meant to induce headaches, sweating, nausea, or even vomiting (and she'd been lucky that he'd messed it up and created a honking sound that had effectively exposed him, thereby allowing her to narrowly avoid all those effects of the curse), Mary had grown more combative with her friends. Where she'd mostly given disapproving looks and condescending nose-wrinkling, nowadays she tended to make unpleasant remarks and even scold on occasion.

And she was not tolerant of _any_ Slytherins, and especially not Mulciber's lot. Which meant that she'd started really bugging Lily about Severus, to the point where Lily had started simply slipping away instead of explaining that she was going to study with him.

Which was what she'd wanted to do today, but obviously that wasn't going to happen, so, resigning herself to being late, Lily nodded her head at Mary's question.

"What do you need?"

"Some help with Charms? I think I want to be a herbologist, maybe do a mastery, and I need at least an 'Exceeds Expectations' on Charms for that. And you're the best at it."

"All right," Lily agreed. "How about this evening, after dinner? I was planning on going through my Astronomy coursework, but honestly, I'd take anything over that."

"Oh. I thought maybe now?"

"I'm sorry, I already have plans."

Mary's eyes narrowed, and she crossed her arms over her chest.

"With Snape, isn't it?"

And there it went.

"Yes, with Severus," Lily said with a sigh, already knowing what was about to follow; she chose to start her walk towards the library and let Mary berate her on the way, as at least then she wouldn't lose as much time.

"Lily, do you really need to spend so much time with that Slytherin? We've barely seen you recently."

"We're studying, Mary," Lily answered. "Severus is one of my oldest friends, all right? Older than you, even, and we've always been good at studying together."

"But he's creepy, Lily," Mary insisted. "You know he spends time with Mulciber."

"I know, but I also spend most of my time with you girls, too; we're in the same House, and so are they," she pointed out, knowing it was useless justification in any case, and that it sounded more apologetic than anything else. She hated talking to her girlfriends about Sev.

"Felix Jones doesn't."

"Felix Jones is one of the weirdest kids of our year," Lily pointed out. Another fifth-year Slytherin, Jones was always alone, and always seemed like he _wanted_ to be alone. In all of her years at Hogwarts, Lily couldn't remember him speaking to anyone but one older-year Hufflepuff nicely, and even that had seemed to be more on the Hufflepuff's effort than the Slytherin's.

"And Snape isn't? Lily, the way he looks at you sometimes, it's not natural."

And now Mary was picking up this stupid idea, too, making Lily wonder if maybe her friend was in cahoots with her sister. What Mary and Petunia were talking about, Lily didn't care to consider.

"Mary, really," she said instead, shaking her head. "Severus is not some sort of, of... sex maniac, or something, all right? I should know, I've been friends with him for seven years."

"You're so blind sometimes, Lily," Mary said with a shake of her head, her words gaining that condescending edge. "Fine, pretend you've no clue what I'm talking about, but once you regret it, you'll know I was right."

"And you'll what, tell me 'I told you so'," Lily snapped back, whirling on the other girl. "Mary, if you have nothing else to say to me except berate me about who my friends are, you might as well just go back to the dorm, all right, because I don't appreciate people thinking they can tell me what to do, and I _really_ don't appreciate them doing it in this down-your-nose way you seem to think I'd listen to."

And with that, she turned away, almost stomping on her way to the library and veritably fuming inside at the gall of the other Gryffindor. Really, when had she started giving the impression that she'd tolerate people condescending her in this manner?

"You're late," Severus pointed out once she stalked to their table and dropped her bag to the floor.

"Oh, don't you start with me too," she snapped, giving him a cross look and then feeling bad when he reared back in obvious surprise. "I'm sorry, I'm just really annoyed right now. Let's just not talk until I can cool down, all right?"

"All right," he agreed quietly, opening his Potions textbook and inadvertently only fuelling her annoyance through the confusion that rose up at his conciliatory acquiescence. She'd expected him to snap back at her in some way, and a part of her had been hoping for it, because now she had to stew in her frustration, and she just knew that this study session wasn't going to end well, not at all.

As it turned out, she was only half-way right in that – while she never managed to regain her former good cheer, Severus was very blatantly non-engaging every time she thought he might snap at her, leading her to realise that he was, for some reason, actively trying to avoid conflict with her, and this just felt _wrong_. They were _always_ combative in their communication, and sometimes it annoyed her, but sometimes she liked it, too, and most importantly, when they were like that, she knew what to expect from one word volley to the next, how to anticipate the path of the conversation. This placid acquiescence of his was making her feel odd-footed.

In truth, this wasn't completely new to her. He'd been more hesitant lately, since their big argument that had resulted in her learning of the Shrieking Shack Incident, and that had made her start tiptoeing around him, too, because Lily had learned very early on that startling Severus in any way rarely ended up well for the people around him, and she didn't want to do anything to make him look at her the way he'd looked at her that day. But now, angry as she was, his holding back on engaging with her _at all_ , on the heels of Mary's treatment of her, also seemed condescending, and it just served to make her angry with him, when she'd not wanted to be.

So she took the earliest available opportunity to pack up her things and leave, convincing herself that when they next saw each other, she'd be in a better mood and he'd pick up on it, and things would return back to normal.

* * *

To Severus' only slight surprise, once he'd approached the other boy, Michael Stone not only came with him to the Headmaster's office and listened to Dumbledore's suggestion, but also in the end accepted it. The suggestion boiled down to Stone and his group of friends covering for Severus whenever necessary, and in exchange, Severus agreed to keep Stone informed as to the movements of the Snakes in his group of friends, as well as to help him and his friends with studying, while Dumbledore promised to look past Stone's usual little tricks and cons he used to filch money and contraband off of students who could afford it, for his silence. Stone gave Severus one evaluating look after they'd left Dumbledore's office that spoke more than a thousand words, but in the end simply let him know where he and his friends usually met, so that Severus could set up a false trail for Avery. His group was a small one, consisting of only two more people next to the dark-skinned boy, neither of whom were Severus' and Stone's year.

"Stacie's with us in Slytherin," Stone explained when he introduced them, "and Ash is in Ravenclaw. We knew each other from Muggle London."

"Is he a new member?" Stacie asked. From the way she'd said it, Severus got the impression she wasn't simply talking about their little group.

"No; he'll just be stopping by from time to time to study, and if anyone asks, he's regular."

Which was the end of that.

Too bad Severus' problems with casting a Patronus couldn't be solved as easily; as his fourth week of meetings with the Headmaster came to a close, he'd as yet not managed to produce anything, and his frustration gave way to dispirited resignation.

"Are you still experiencing difficulties with your housemates?" Dumbledore asked after he declared the casting portion of the evening at an end. Ever since Severus' violent outburst the previous week, the Headmaster had begun simply speaking with him for the second half of the evening. So far, it had always been about the magical experimentation Severus was doing, and Dumbledore didn't hesitate to give pointers and suggestions that Severus had resisted a little bit at first, but in the end found to be immense help with certain problems he was having with transfiguration magic.

"Stone is keeping to his agreement," Severus answered, trying to put aside his feelings of despondency and uselessness when it came to the Patronus Charm and instead focus on the topic of conversation. It felt good to know that the Headmaster seemed interested in such a thing as Severus' wellbeing in the Den of Snakes. "Mulciber and Philes are still suspicious, but Avery and Thistletwaithe seem to have moved on, at least for now."

"That is indeed good news," Dumbledore answered. "So, if not them, what else is causing you frustration?"

"Maybe the fact that I've been trying to master the Patronus Charm for four bloody weeks, and so far I've conjured absolutely nothing?" he shot back.

"Come now, Mr Snape; we've spoken already about the importance of emotional control for the successful conjuration of one's Patronus, and that half-hearted efforts will not be nearly enough. I can hardly assist you in this if you are not honest with yourself."

Gnashing his teeth, Severus rubbed his suddenly sweaty palms against his thighs, wrestling with his mistrust and defensiveness.

"All right, fine."

"Now, care to give the answer another try?"

The answer Severus had given the old wizard had been quite true – he _was_ extremely annoyed with his lack of progress – but since that wasn't what Dumbledore was looking for, and the old wizard was instead demanding that Severus be 'honest with himself', there was only one thing that came to his mind that might be what the man wanted. The Slytherin took a moment to consider _why_ , precisely, he was this frustrated with failure, and didn't have to think hard to find the answer.

"I get... frustrated, when things don't work out the way they should."

"But isn't that part of the normal experimentation process?" Dumbledore questioned. "After all, you cannot always be correct in your assumptions as to how an alteration to a potion would work."

"Yes, but with potion-making, there are rules that make sense," Severus explained. "A certain sequence of stirs creates defined forces within the cauldron that affect the mixture. I know how they work and what they do, and it's easy to predict the end result. It is the same with the properties of ingredients and their interactions."

"But certainly you cannot _always_ be right."

"Well, obviously," he said with a roll of his eyes. "But even then, I can determine what I did wrong from the result I get. With the Patronus Charm, there's nothing. How the hell can I even know that I'm not doing _everything_ wrong, when I don't know that I'm doing _anything_ wrong in the first place?!"

"You focus too much on the end result," Dumbledore answered with a shake of his head. "Even an incorporeal Patronus can be a successful defence. Far more important is holding on to the positive emotions that your memories should invoke. You are aware that the Patronus Charm is primarily used in warding off Dementors, yes? Have you ever come close to one?"

Severus shook his head, frowning; in all of Dumbledore's talk about emotions and memories and the Patronus and love, he'd completely forgotten that one of the primary purposes of the charm was to defend against those vile creatures.

"Dementors drain all positivity out of any who are unlucky enough to be found in their radius of influence," Dumbledore explained. "This is why strong memories are crucial, because our memories are often quite tightly associated with emotions, and by invoking strong, happy memories, the witch or wizard uses them to protect the positivity of their spirit. It is a constant struggle, of course, as Dementors feed on such emotions, and it is these emotions that we must use to fight them. If you are focusing on why you are unable to produce anything, then this frustration bleeds over into your sense of the memory you use and taints it, making it weaker, which naturally results in no Patronus being produced."

That made sense, Severus supposed. "So, what you're saying is, in effect, that I have to stop paying any mind to whether I'm successful or not."

"Yes, that is precisely right. I understand that this goes against your nature; it does for most goal-oriented individuals. But it is important."

"All right; I'll keep it in mind for next time," Severus agreed, finding it a little easier to let go of the frustration he was feeling about this, at least for the moment. He knew it would be a struggle the next time he attempted to cast the charm, but perhaps he could find a trick or two to convince himself to not think on it too much; after all, while potioneering experimentation had its own order and structure that he understood intimately, inventing spells was somewhat more similar to what the Headmaster was describing here, and he'd over the years found ways of getting around such inconveniences. He'd simply never experienced such a consistent failure rate as he was having with the Patronus Charm.

"Also, Severus, this is not limited to your dissatisfaction with your progress; it is important that you can determine the source of _any_ negativity that is influencing your hold over whichever happy memory you choose for the Patronus practice, so that you can more easily put it aside. I am certain that this will help."

"I suppose," he answered, a little dubiously, thinking instead that most of the things in his life caused him stress, so how in the world was he supposed to be able to put _all_ of them aside?

"We will work on this in our next sessions," Dumbledore decided. "For now, give this some thought over the weekend, and I will see you on Monday."

"Good night, Headmaster," Severus said, rising to his feet and offering the old wizard one last look.

"Good night, Mr Snape, and colourful dreams."

It was such a funny phrase, so incongruous with who Dumbledore could be, yet so typically him, that Severus ended up almost smirking to himself as he exited the Headmaster's office. Colourful dreams, indeed.


	5. Ch I,4: The Design behind Parallels

**Chapter 4: The Design behind Parallels**

The preparations for the O.W.L.s picked up in earnest as April arrived, and proportionally to them rose the tension among the fifth-years. People were stressing about the exams, stressing about their plans for the future, and stressing most of all about the lack of sleep.

And Remus was stressing about the upcoming full moon, as well.

James' (in his opinion rather appropriate) answer to this was to set up a magnificent prank that the whole school would be privy to. Sirius was immediately in, of course, and after some debate as to what would be the most appropriate course of action, so were Remus and Peter. It was a relatively easy thing, really; the hard part was finding the tools they'd need – in this case, syringes from the hospital wing that they thought Madam Pomfrey wouldn't notice were missing (and James still couldn't quite figure out _why_ she'd even need syringes, when there was magic to be used), and a few bottles of extremely hot chilli sauce that Remus liked to put on his rare meat whenever the full moon drew near and so had his mother send him bottles – but after that, all they had to do was sneak into the kitchens under the Invisibility Cloak right before the Easter feast, which was usually held on Tuesday evening before the one-week Easter holiday began, and work around the house-elves setting up the banquet as they injected the hot sauce in any and all food they could get away with on the Slytherin table. Remus played the distraction they needed to get in and out without alerting the house-elves by asking them to make him something very light to eat since he wasn't feeling well (and with the fact that the full moon was tomorrow night, he was _really_ rocking the sick look), and James and Sirius worked under the Cloak, with Wormtail on James' shoulder, warning them of any possible danger.

And the sight was _spectacular_. They managed to get to dinner right as the main course was about to be served, sneaking in as unobtrusively as they could under the Cloak (it was more than a tight fit now, and James rued that the days when they could have all four fit together under it were over), so that they could sit back and watch as the Slytherins dug into their food and then one by one began spitting, gulping liquids from their goblets, panting and otherwise freaking out.

Some of the older ones didn't seem to mind too much, which James had sort-of expected, but the youngest were shouting loudly and tearing up, jumping away from their table, tripping over the benches and even falling down. It was utter chaos, and James gladly joined in the uproarious laughter of the three quarters of the school, leaning against Sirius, who was guffawing loudly, with Peter sniggering that quiet, choking laugh of his on the other side.

"All right, all right!" McGonagall exclaimed, rising from her seat to shoot out colourful bangs into the air and try to regain order in the room. "What is the meaning of this?"

"Hot, hot, hot," a small, blonde-haired girl panted, waving her hand frantically in front of her mouth.

"There's hot sauce in all the food!" the seventh-year prefect girl exclaimed.

"Tastes fine to me," a sixth-year said with a shrug, one of those who didn't seem too affected by it. James saw Sirius' younger brother Regulus trying to wipe his tongue with a napkin, and searched around for Snivellus, finally finding him at the far end of the table, panting with a pinched look on his face that James thought absolutely hilarious.

"Milk, you should drink milk, not water or pumpkin juice!" the Ravenclaw Head Girl shouted, which only set the whole room off again, even as the Slytherins shot her venomous glares and shouts.

"She's right!" James heard another girl yell out over the cacophony of laughter from a few seats away. "Professor, milk helps get rid of the burning from capsaicin!"

McGonagall seemed to have heard her, because she waved her wand at the Slytherin table and jugs of milk appeared on it. Most Slytherins refused to touch them, but some of the younger ones seemed desperate enough to listen to a Gryffindor, reaching for the bottles to chug directly from them.

"Oh, thank Merlin! They're right!" a boy who couldn't have been more than a third year yelled out, his voice still not mutated, giving him a very strong, high pitch. "It helps!"

That seemed to release the floodgates, and suddenly a full two thirds of the table were almost wrestling for the milk jugs, and James felt tears starting to drip down his cheeks, letting his head drop onto the table as his whole frame shook in such powerful laughter that his stomach was starting to cramp. Really, this was even better than he could have planned.

"Professor, I think she's allergic!" a panicked voice rang out, belonging to a dark-haired Slytherin girl sitting somewhere relatively close to Snivellus as she held up a truly tiny child. The little girl was hyperventilating, but she seemed to have trouble breathing, and there was a nasty red colour surrounding her mouth and throat. Both McGonagall and Pomfrey rushed from the Head table to assist the girl, while Dumbledore took over handling the room, vanishing everything from the Slytherin table and summoning again the milk jugs.

"I didn't know you could be allergic to hot sauce," Sirius said with an incredulous look.

"You can be allergic to almost anything," Remus said quietly.

"And I'm sure it didn't help that the stuff is _hot_ ," Peter pointed out.

"You know, now I want to try it," James murmured, finally catching his breath and wiping tears of laughter from his eyes and off his cheeks.

"What, can't have some of _them_ stomaching it so easily?" Sirius said with a smirk.

"Exactly. I bet it's not even that bad."

"It is," Sirius promised him with a wide grin.

"I don't even know how you can eat it, Remus," Peter agreed, face pinched a little. "That dare wasn't very pleasant."

"But totally worth it, right, Wormtail?"

"Well, if you didn't put globs of it on your food," Remus muttered with a shake of his head.

"Don't you even care?" Lily's slightly shrill voice asked, and James jerked back when he realised that she was standing behind him, practically hovering over him. "Don't you care that a girl ended up in the hospital wing from your prank?"

"How were we supposed to know you could be allergic to a chili pepper?" Sirius asked her with all the incredulity they were all feeling.

"It was hilarious, though, wasn't it? In the grand scheme of things," James asked her, giving her his best smile and running his hand unconsciously through his hair. Lily's gorgeous green eyes shot downwards to him, and apparently she wasn't finding it as funny as he thought she would, because she her lips didn't twitch even a little bit.

"It was hurtful," she retorted.

"There she goes, Prefect St. Evans to the defence of all things Slytherings," Sirius mocked.

"Someone needs to do it around here, because apparently _your_ prefect is perfectly fine participating in a fiasco like this."

Out of the corner of his eye, James saw Remus shift uneasily in his seat.

"Come now, Evans," he coaxed her, "don't tell me you didn't crack one smile. Just one teeny, tiny one?"

And of course she had, just like everyone else, because it had been bloody funny, at least until that little girl had needed to be taken to the hospital wing. Lily, however, rather than admit it, gave him a withering look, apparently having decided to ignore her reddening cheeks, before turning away from them to march out of the Great Hall. James stared after her until she vanished from sight, before remembering to look back at the Slytherin table, where, of course, Snivellus now _wasn't_. Bloody hell, was there no way to get rid of that leech?

Apparently, Dumbledore did agree with them that triggering that girl's allergic reaction was not something they could have ever anticipated, because they were only summoned to McGonagall's office the following day so that she could give them some of her disapproving glares, take house points and assign detention ( _detention_ , James thought with a snort; as if they'd never gotten those before). And if Remus seemed a bit more eager to spend time studying with Lily instead of the Marauders, James told himself that wasn't too surprising; after all, who could ever resist Lily Evans?

(Though he did make sure Remus knew she was off limits; some lines _needed_ to be drawn clearly, and this was one of them.)

* * *

Most of the fifth-years stayed for the one-week Easter break at the school; to Severus' great relief, Mulciber, Avery and Thistletwaithe weren't among them, which meant that, at least for a week, he could breathe a little easier – Philes was an unpleasant character, but he'd recently gotten together with one of the fifth-year Slytherin girls and was too preoccupied to concern himself with Severus' comings and goings.

And, for once, Severus found that he was not even that angry with what Potter and his cronies had done to the Slytherins; for one thing, there was a smidge of vindictive pleasure in not being the only one targeted by that lot, and for another, Lily had for once actually expressed genuine concern, not only for Severus, but also for the first-year who'd ended up in the hospital wing (he'd later learned her name was Vivienne, and she was under Stacie Monroe's wing, which meant that Stone and his lot were looking to get revenge against the Marauders, though from all he'd heard, that might be a while, as their idea of revenge differed quite a bit from that of Severus' group).

Still, Dumbledore didn't seem nearly as judgmental of the whole thing as Stone and Monroe, which made Severus resentful to an extent, because it was another symptom of the endemic issue of Hogwarts that was Gryffindors being favoured in general and Potter's group in particular over all the other students of the school (and especially Slytherins).

"Professor McGonagall has precedence in these situations," the Headmaster said calmly. "She is their Head of House, and I defer to her judgment."

"You're the school's headmaster!"

"Yes, but if I were responsible for punishing every single transgression in the school, I'd not have time for any of my other, more important, duties."

"And what will she do?"

"I believe, Mr Snape, that that isn't your concern," Dumbledore said, a little sharply. "Trust me when I tell you that they will be punished for it adequately."

Severus truly doubted _that_ , but what else could he say on the subject? More importantly, what cause had Dumbledore ever given him to _trust him_ on a thing like this?

"I have quite a bit of studying to do tonight, so if you'll excuse me, Headmaster–"

"As it is, I will not. Sit down, please, Severus."

Fuming, Severus did as he was instructed; in spite of that 'please', he knew very well that this was an order he was not to disobey, and he despised being ordered to do anything. It was all he could do to escape that at home, and he wasn't looking to suffer it here at school too, beyond what was expected of the students' position.

"You will, in the course of your life, find yourself in situations where you must work alongside people who displease you, or whom you dislike. If your only response to such a situation is to avoid it, you will never achieve anything worthwhile," Dumbledore said. "So, since this is a perfect opportunity for it, we will continue with our planned session, and you will have the opportunity to practice it."

Severus gave the Headmaster a flat look.

"Yes, of all the things in my life I've been unable to do, _this_ by far should take precedence in my endeavours," he couldn't help the sarcasm. "You are aware of the fact that I'm a Slytherin, sir? The last time I checked, being able to work with people we can't stand is part of the House membership description."

He almost winced the moment he closed his mouth, his instincts telling him to expect some sort of reproach.

To his surprise, Dumbledore actually chuckled, and suddenly, the oppressive atmosphere was lifted, leaving Severus to be privately mildly baffled; if he'd spoken like this to any other adult he knew, teacher and parent alike, he would have gotten a tongue-lashing. Yet Dumbledore, for all his authoritative presence and Severus' rather harsh expectations, seemed to be willing to tolerate far more disrespect than he ought to have. The Slytherin had assumed that Dumbledore's grandfatherly, lemon-sweets-offering persona was a sham, cleverly designed to trick unsuspecting witches and wizards and lull them into complacency, but perhaps there was a little more truth to it than that.

Severus wasn't sure whether that served to put him a little bit more at ease, or more on edge.

"Forgive me; I had assumed you would not have had to contend with this particular issue much here at Hogwarts."

"No, but I did go to primary school."

"Really? I had assumed that you would have been home-schooled, like most wizarding children."

"My father is a Muggle," he reminded the man with no little resentment in his voice. "There was no way Mother would have raised a fuss about me not attending a primary school."

"Did you dislike the Muggle primary, then?"

"I was the only wizarding child there." Dumbledore looked at him as if that didn't quite explain it; why, though, Severus couldn't say. In his experience, all of Wizarding Britain stood out to the Muggle populace, and Severus, with his second-hand, ill-sized clothes and long hair, had had more than a rotten time of it until he'd met Lily. "Muggles are not very tolerant of those who are different from their norm," Severus clarified for the old man. "Even Lily got offended the first time I talked to her, and her sister's hated the very sight of me since." It was part of the reason why he despised Muggles, because they were intolerant, ignorant, idiotic lot who demanded that everyone conform to their ideas of how things should work.

"Did your parents not try to help you with this?"

"Mother despises those who attempt to conform to idiotic norms, and I had no intention of pandering to their narrow-minded ideas," Severus rebuffed the suggestion with the disgust it deserved. While part of the reason for it was the fact that they didn't have money to spend on new clothes for him that he'd just grow out of within half a year, the much bigger part was the fact that both he and his mother had plenty of pride in their wizarding heritage, and they were not going to let anyone take that away from them.

"And yet you do wish to fit in with your Slytherin year-mates."

"That is _completely_ different," he shot back, hackles rising, because the very thought was absolutely insulting. "They're my _friends_ , and this is my world. Those Muggle children at the primary are, are–"

"And Miss Evans? Did you approach her only because she is a witch?"

Did he? Frowning, Severus tried to remember; the first conscious sight of her was burned in his mind, but what had made him look in the first place was another matter entirely. He had to have run into her at their school before that without noticing her; they'd attended the same primary, after all, and he'd only met her when they'd been nine. But Lily was such a fixed figure in his life, the first wizarding child he'd ever met, the first person he'd actually liked, the first friend he'd ever made, the first girl he'd ever fallen in love with, that he just couldn't quite remember a time before her except in those things that were cast in sharp contrast by her presence, or in those parts of his life where she'd never held a place (such as his home life). Had he approached her because he'd seen her do magic, or had it simply been because even then, she'd been _Lily_?

"Perhaps you are seeing things this way because you wish them to be so," Dumbledore suggested when it became obvious that Severus had no answer to give him. "Human nature is not something dictated by magical cores or blood. It is universal."

"So you say. But it's just naïve to think so."

"Very well," the old wizard agreed congenially. "But we can return to this topic in ten-year's time, and we will see whether you still feel the same way."

Yes, Severus would look forward to _that_. Though the idea that things might develop in the next ten years – and that was almost two-thirds of his whole life up until now – in such a way that he would be able to sit with Albus Dumbledore like he was doing right now and, what, chat about existential issues over tea, as preposterous as it sounded, as dismissively improbable – even impossible – to a pragmatist like Severus, it still held an unusual appeal. It implied that there would be no war to contend with, no sides to choose, no problems to solve, and that sounded bloody nice right about now. But it was a pipe dream, and Severus knew it for what it was.

"Sure," he agreed, more to indulge the man than because he meant it. "Whatever you say."

Dumbledore only smiled lightly and conjured a tea-set.

"Now, is there anything else you might wish to discuss, before we begin with the Patronus Charm?"

Severus opened his mouth to say 'no', and changed his mind in the last moment. The man _had_ offered freely, after all, and it wouldn't be too different from Severus simply telling him about his inventions and the old wizard giving comments of his own accord.

"There's a spell I've mostly put together, to cause rapid nail growth," he explained, digging his _Advanced Potion-Making_ book out of his bag to find the page where he'd scribbled the Nail-Growing Hex. "But I can't get it to be specific to certain nails."

"And why do you feel this spell would benefit you?"

Because it could cause people he didn't like considerable pain if he could only get it to work on toenails? But he couldn't tell Dumbledore that, so he cast his mind out for another reason. "Because if I can target it to the wand hand, then it could cause my opponent to drop their wand," he invented on the spot (though in hindsight, it was a bloody good use for it, too; maybe working out a spell for both fingernails and toenails would be beneficial, after all). "Human nails can slice through skin if they're sharp enough." And he could try to make them even sharper as part of the spell, too, then it would _really_ work well.

"Very well; let me see what you've developed so far, and perhaps I might have some suggestions you would find useful."

In the end, they spent most of the evening on this, with Severus explaining in detail his thought behind the magical theory of body modifications that he'd need for the spell, the incantation language and wand movement, and the underlying thought process necessary for the spell, and Dumbledore pointing out things that he felt might use improvement, or perhaps some concepts he felt could be tweaked, until both completely forgot about the Patronus Charm, their reason for meeting in the first place. It took a while for him to come to the realisation that this was, in fact, a little different from their previous forays into Severus' experimentations, because whereas previously Dumbledore had listened and Severus had expounded in general terms, this time they were going in-depth with regards to one specific spell, and the Headmaster seemed to be approaching it differently – not as someone with simply a general interest, but as an educator. Severus had never had anyone to share the thought process behind his inventions with, and he'd also never experienced what it felt like to have the full attention of a teacher, either. It was energising, being able to not only learn from someone of such power and knowledge as Albus Dumbledore, but also simply to share the intellectual challenge and debate solutions, to match wits and not be judged for not knowing something.

By the end of the evening, when he had several new directions to explore with the hex, none of the usual frustrations and annoyances of his life seemed to matter to him very much. Not the Marauders getting away with putting a girl in the hospital wing and causing discomfort to more than a hundred others, not the resentment towards his father and mother for never caring enough to sit with him like this, not even the instinctual discomfort that always came with the feeling of his mistrust of Dumbledore slipping through his fingers, and especially not that they'd in the end not gotten to the Patronus Charm practice.

He'd learned more in two hours than he had in months, Dumbledore had even praised him for certain unusual ways in which he'd thought to circumvent the problems of applying only part of the Engorgement Charm theory to his spell, he'd get to see Lily more over the week with most of his friends and hers gone from Hogwarts, and for once, someone else was going to get revenge on the Marauders, too.

If only he could have forgotten what it was that loomed behind his meetings with Dumbledore, his evening would have been perfect.

* * *

Lily went to see Remus in the hospital wing on Thursday morning, and, as she'd expected, found his three friends congregating around his bed. They all looked relatively dead on their feet, which Lily did think a little strange, but chucked it up to their worry for Remus, combined with the fact that they'd probably wanted to be on hand every possible moment, and with the days getting longer as they stepped firmly into spring, that was probably later in the evening and earlier in the morning than it had been a few months ago.

"How is he?" she asked quietly, stepping next to James. Remus appeared to be sleeping.

"All right, all things considered," James answered, for once not seeming very interested in ruffling his hair or doing whatever weird things James usually did. In fact, he seemed sad.

"He's so pale."

"This is your first, isn't it?" he asked her, turning his head slightly to look at her as she drew up a chair. On the other side of the bed, Sirius had pillowed his head on his hands on the mattress, and appeared to be almost asleep, while Peter was resting his elbow near Remus' knee and was looking at her with half-lidded eyes.

"Yeah; I'd not known when exactly it was last month, and I didn't want to ask him," she confirmed. Also, the last full moon had been maybe a week after Severus had told her about the incident with the four Gryffindors, and it had been too fresh in her mind to think of much else, at least until she'd noticed that Remus was missing from class and realised what she'd missed.

"He sleeps for most of the day right after," Peter said softly.

"And Madam Pomfrey lets you stay here the whole time?"

"No, we usually come see him in the morning and between classes unless it's the weekend," James explained, "but since we're on break now and she knows it's just easier to let us do what we want anyway, she's let us stay if we're quiet."

"She thought at first that we'd upset him, back in second year, but now she knows Remus feels better if we're here when he wakes up," Peter added.

Lily nodded and took her time to inspect Remus, with his scratched-up face and the bags under his eyes and the pallor of his skin; he looked truly awful, his expression almost pinched in pain, and she felt admiration rise in her at the thought that he went through this every month without a complaint or a protest, that he endured month after month after month of what had to be torture and terror, and somehow could still come out as a kind, selfless person that she was starting to truly see him as.

And to think that Sirius Black would have risked someone like Remus to satisfy some stupid grudge that didn't even make sense to anyone but himself and James. She wanted to hate them for it, wanted it almost desperately, but the fact that they were here, looking as if they'd not slept a wink the whole night and obviously camped out to stay by his side until he was released, it wouldn't let her.

They were flawed friends to him, but they were his friends, best friends, and Lily prayed that they'd not betray him like that again. Remus deserved better. For all the hatred and fear that she'd learned was associated with lycanthropy in the wizarding world, for the horrifying, terrifying idea of werewolves that these painted, Lily simply couldn't equate that to her friend, lying on the hospital bed and trying to regain his strength from such a hard ordeal. It really made her wonder how the wizarding world was so much better than the Muggle one, if they wanted to treat Muggle-borns the way the Americans treated black people, or werewolves like Europe had treated lepers.

As a kid, she'd cared about social justice quite a bit; watching that video of Martin Luther King Junior's speech on the telly in 1968 after he'd been assassinated, hearing him speak of the freedom for the Negro, the dream he had for a better world, she'd thought that if she were one of those big American people, she would have done all to help. At eight years of age, she'd not been able to understand or appreciate it fully, but even then, it had filled her with a sense of purpose and righteousness. It had called to something in her very core, that declared all people equal, that understood no one was inherently better than anyone else, and as she'd grown older, she'd come to appreciate all the shades and difficulties behind that truth.

But then the wizarding world had come calling, and her head had been filled with so many other things, so that even when she'd been confronted with this same problem that the black people of America faced, a problem that placed _her_ on the other side, the side of those being discriminated against, she'd not thought of it much.

And yet, sitting here by the bedside of yet another victim of such thinking, those beautiful, meaningful words she'd heard so long ago came back to her, so that she murmured: "I have a dream."

"What's that?" Sirius asked, turning his head to the other side so that he could look at her.

"A speech I heard long ago," she answered. "That I'd forgotten about."

And she shouldn't have; by Merlin, she shouldn't have. But she remembered now, and she knew what she was going to do in the future, for Remus and Severus and Mary and herself and all the other Muggle-borns whose very lives were being put into jeopardy by that horrid wizard, for all those who were forced to live in terror and shame and hatred.

"How does it go?" James asked, and he sounded so interested that she couldn't help but smile at him, as she felt herself filling with new determination from an old, old source within herself.

" _I have a dream_ ," she began, looking towards the other two boys and finding them to be paying attention to her, too, and the words came back as if from a long-lost place, but still there, still warming her from inside, " _I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live by the words: 'We hold it self-evident, that all men are created equal'. I have a dream that my children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character._ "

She couldn't remember any more, though she knew there was, but these two sentences had stayed with her. Glancing at the three boys, she felt her cheeks heating up at their strange looks, awe-struck and confused in the same measure, as it came to her that they'd probably not understand, not when they'd grown up in the wizarding world.

" _Thank God almighty we are free at last_. Doctor Martin Luther King Junior," Remus voiced softly, and Lily's heart jumped at his weak but steady voice. She'd not even noticed him waking up. "I remember watching that with my ma after he'd been killed."

"Me too," she confirmed. "How are you, Remus?"

"All things considered," he answered with a shrug, "I've had worse months."

"So, who is this guy you were talking about?" James asked.

"He was an American activist who fought for the rights of black people in the sixties. The black people were slaves there for even longer than they were here," she explained, "and they were forced to live completely apart from the white people when he was fighting for their rights."

"Wait, black people? You mean, with dark skin?" Sirius asked, frowning. "They were _slaves_?"

"You don't know? There were slaves in Britain until the 1830s!"

"Not in the wizarding world," James repudiated. "Skin colour makes no difference to the magical folk."

"No, but blood does," Remus said quietly. "That's why you thought of it, isn't it? Because he was fighting against the oppression of black people, and we're fighting You-Know-Who and his ideas of oppression of Muggle-borns."

Lily nodded. "And not only that, Remus. The rights of all sentient beings. _Your_ rights, too. Look at what Professor Dumbledore had to do for you to attend Hogwarts, and how many other wizarding children are out there with the same affliction, who haven't gotten this chance? And it's absolutely absurd to think that because you're dangerous for one night out of twenty-eight, that you'd always be a blood-thirsty monster!"

"To be fair, most werewolves like giving off that impression," Sirius pointed out. "Have you ever heard of Fenrir Greyback?"

"No; is he a werewolf?"

"He's Moldyshorts' personal dog, and if what I've heard is correct, he's been biting people purposefully to make an army. He and others like him are the reason why life is so hard for Remus. And he's doing it on Voldemort's orders, I'll bet you anything on it. My parents think Voldemort is the best thing that ever happened to Wizarding Britain," he said disgustedly, "that he's a revolutionary who will clean up the mess Muggle-lovers like Dumbledore have made of Wizarding Britain and make us great again. But to hear Cousin Bella talking of him, you'd get the chills. That is a monster, not a man, not if she's not exaggerating, and honestly, for all her obsession with him, I still have a feeling she's not."

"I'm going to fight him," Lily said firmly. "Once I finish Hogwarts, I'll find a way to fight him, even if I have to become an Auror to do it. If he's anything like that – and I think he is – then he can't be allowed to succeed. He _can't_."

"You know Clara Shanwick, the seventh-year Ravenclaw who is friends with the Head Girl?" Peter asked.

"Yeah, I've spoken to her a few times; she was friends with Alice while they were both here."

"I've heard that she and some others from her year are sort-of Dumbledore's eyes and ears in the school, for people who'll want to fight after they get out of here," he explained. "She might have some useful information to give you."

"I'll see about that. Thank you, Peter."

The pudgy boy went a little red in the face and offered a timid smile, which Lily returned with a much more confident one of her own.

"You know, I somehow don't think your _best mate_ will be much pleased with this decision," James said with such ugliness in his voice that Lily frowned at him. Best mate?

Then it came to her.

"I'm not talking to you about Severus," she retorted, crossing her arms over her chest.

"And why not? The last time I checked, his group is headed straight under Voldemort's robes if they can."

"Severus is not like that."

"He's not? Sure had me fooled," he said with faux-boredom, and Lily clenched her teeth; part of her knew that he was obviously spoiled for a fight for some reason, and he was going to pick it with her if it was the last thing he did – she'd thought it more on par with Black's usual attitude, but apparently these sorts of things tended to rub off between friends – but she couldn't not take the bait (and no doubt, he knew it, too).

"That's because you don't know him like I do."

"Like you _think_ you know him," Sirius got involved. "There's a smidge of difference between the two. And James is right; I would like to hear your justification about being friends with someone who is fundamentally against the very thing that makes you who you are, Evans."

"Severus is a victim."

"I'm– I'm sorry, I must have misheard that. Snivellus, a _victim_? Evans, you are either completely blind, or your definition of victims needs fixing. _Remus_ is a victim, of the werewolf who'd been so twisted to attack a four-year-old _child_ –"

"Keep me out of this, Padfoot," Remus interjected, though Sirius paid him no mind.

"Snivellus Snape is _not_ a victim! He's a bloodist like all his mates, and I don't know _what_ that makes you, if you believe otherwise."

"Well, he's certainly _your_ victim," she shot back, jumping to her feet with fists clenched at her side. "And Remus is, too, but maybe that's slipped your selective little brain. You want to know how he can be a victim? He's a victim of circumstance and bad home life and even worse surroundings."

"Sirius is a victim of those things," Potter answered coldly. "His mother considers Dark curses appropriate punishment for having one thought that differs from hers, his father is manipulative enough to make his life living hell, and his only brother can't wait for him to get disowned so that he can become the Black Heir. But unlike Snivellus, Sirius is not going around wanting to join a monster's quest to subjugate a third of our population. You think we're just the product of our circumstances? _I_ think we're the product of our _choices_ , Lily, and Snape's choices are _quite_ obvious. They are _not_ the right ones."

"Guys–" Remus called out, but Lily paid him no mind.

"This, coming from someone who _chooses_ to attack people for his own personal vendetta and amusement," she retorted sharply. "You better look at your own behaviour, Potter, before you go judging others, or you might just find yourself being a goddamned hypocrite."

"Pot, meet kettle!" Sirius exclaimed. "No, wait, my mistake; declaring you'll fight for Muggle-born rights in one breath, and then turning around and defending Snivellus for stomping on those rights with another, that just makes you an apologist, doesn't it?"

"And I should be more like you, perhaps? What have you ever done that's so good, Black? Oh, right, you got sorted into the Gryffindor House, as if that's the biggest achievement in the world. Never mind that you are willing to put your best friend in danger to get even with someone who half the time hasn't even done anything to you!"

"What I did was a prank that got a little out of control; what he's doing is supporting murderers and monsters, and you're excusing him!"

" _I_ am trying to keep Severus from joining those murderers and monsters, because he has no one else! Have you ever even thought of doing that for your brother, maybe? Or is all you see about Regulus the fact that he's wearing the snake crest? But of course, Sirius Black is the victim of his circumstances, isn't he, so he gets to only think of himself! Never mind that his parents are filling his younger brother's, _only_ brother's, head with spiteful bigotry and hatred! No, _he_ is the victim of his circumstances, because he _dared_ defy his family's expectations and be sorted into Gryffindor, but his brother's absolutely _not_ the victim of those same circumstances because his way of coping is more effective than yours."

"You know _nothing_ about my brother, Evans, so shut your trap!"

"And you know nothing about my best friend, either, Black! But you aren't giving me the same courtesy, are you?"

"Stop it!" Remus' voice echoed on the edges of her consciousness, but she was too riled to pay it any mind.

"And how are you trying to keep Snivellus from joining the Death Eaters?" Potter questioned with a scoff. "By finding flimsy justifications for his actions? By pretending that he'll up and change his mind, because you want him to? Has he given you a _single_ indication that he's not already made up his mind?"

"At least I'm _trying_! You're only making it worse!" she almost screamed out, feeling tears of frustration gathering in the corners of her eyes. "Did _you_ ever stop to consider that your persecution of him is serving to convince him that the other side is better? Will you be happy, if he ends up proving you right? Will you for a second think that it was partly your fault, for treating him so horribly and bullying him like those Slytherins bully us Muggle-borns? You pride yourself on standing up for what's right, for equal rights, for the Light, but that's selective, isn't it? Equal, but only for those whom you like, and those whom you don't, like _my best friend_ , he can go screw himself for all you care!"

"And when will it b–"

" _Enough!_ "

The silencing spell settled on them like a heavy blanket, and in the silence it created, Lily found her ears ringing and her chest heaving. Madam Pomfrey had been the one to cast the spell, though she seemed to have done it a second after Peter, if the heaviness of the magic around them was anything to go by.

"You will _not_ air your personal conflicts in _my_ hospital wing!" she exclaimed, glaring all of them down. "This is a place of rest and recuperation, and you all claimed to come here to give comfort to a sick friend! Yet he's been the one who's been trying to get you to stop arguing, to no avail! And one of you a prefect! This behaviour is unacceptable!"

Shame-faced and still angry, Lily nodded her head and gave an apologetic look to Remus, who appeared exhaustedly resigned as he looked at all of them. Potter and Black looked mostly chagrined that they'd been manhandled in this manner by the Hogwarts matron, while Peter appeared like he wasn't quite certain what to do with himself.

"If you wish to continue this argument," Madam Pomfrey went on, "then you will do so _outside_. Is that understood?"

She lifted both silencing spells and crossed her arms over her chest, waiting for their responses. Lily wasted no time.

"Think what you want, both of you; I know that I'm doing the right thing."

"Well, so long as _you_ know!" Black replied mockingly, while Potter seemed more interested in continuing the argument.

"Lily, you are being unreason–"

"You don't get to tell me that," she hissed at him, her neck burning from Madam Pomfrey's pointed look. "I am done talking to you about this. Remus, get well soon."

Then she whirled on her heel and marched out of the hospital wing, and only when she reached the courtyard and the fresh Scottish air filled her lungs did she realise that she was shaking.

Because she was _not_ going to even think about their words and accusations, she was _not_ going to give them the satisfaction of rattling her, not when their actions were just as bad, and they weren't willing to even consider them, let alone admit anything else.

Potter and Black and their group could just keep their biased opinions to themselves, and so could Mary and Clotilde and Bettina for that matter. She was the one who'd been friends with Severus since they were nine, and she was the one who knew him, not they, and how _dare_ they claim that she didn't know what she was doing?

So, for all she cared, they could take those opinions and shove them up their arses. Severus was her friend, and she was going to make him see reason on this, and when she managed that, oh, then she was going to _gloat_ as she watched them eat their words and doubts.

* * *

"Now, will there be order here?" Madam Pomfrey demanded to know once the hospital door had swung shut after Lily. James nodded his head and plopped down into the chair he'd jumped out of sometime in the middle of that argument, and Sirius followed suit, so that finally the Hogwarts matron seemed satisfied enough there would be no more disturbances.

Once she'd left them alone, Remus shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead to relieve the headache; it had been building since he'd come back to himself that morning, and the respite he'd gotten with his nap had been completely obliterated by their yelling.

"Why would you provoke her like this?" he asked James. "You know how she reacts when someone disparages Snape."

"Because she's wrong about him, and she refuses to see it," James answered. "You know I'm right; it's completely illogical that she's expounding on social justices when she's best friends with what I imagine would correspond to a slave-owner by that analogy with the American blacks."

"I've got to sit you three down one day and explain some Muggle issues to you," Remus murmured. "Snape would be the farthest thing from a slave-owner; they were rich and high-born. He'd be more like a member of the Ku Klux Kl–"

"Oh, who cares?" Sirius interrupted him. "We have our own issues to deal with here in the magical world, Moony. If she wants to lie to herself and pretend that she's this great saviour of _Snivellus_ , I say let her."

"We can't," James disagreed. "He'll just end up hurting her, and I don't want to see that happen. She deserves better."

"And your last attempt to convey this to her went oh-so-well."

"Well, if you hadn't butted in–"

"It would have ended up the same way," Sirius finished for him. "It's _Evans_ we're talking about. She's far too stubborn, and now that Snivellus has somehow convinced her that we're his tormentors or some rot, you've lost what leverage you _did_ have with her. She'll not listen to you if you told her the sky was blue, just to be contrary!"

Remus sighed, wishing they'd just _stop_. Really, his head hurt too much for it, to say nothing of the fact that while their words were absolutely true regarding Snape and Lily's irrational behaviour on this front, _they_ were doing the exact same thing as her, completely dismissing her points because they'd been angered into it.

Because, while they may not have heard it, Remus had – Lily's assertion that they were not helping her with their pranks against the greasy Slytherin boy held truth in it. With each year that came and passed, the animosity between them and him grew, and the more it grew, the more Lily was being placed in the middle, by being friends with both of them (well, her friendship with James and Sirius was debatable, but Remus did think that she cared for _him_ , at least a little – he didn't think she'd have come visit him if this wasn't the case, and the thought was almost painful in a good way – and he knew that Snape despised him as much as the rest of them, though Remus had tried to keep out of the most direct of conflicts since becoming a prefect). If she really was trying to keep Snape from going to the side of Dark, then James and Sirius were just hindering her efforts.

It was just that Remus agreed with his friends on the point that Snape was most likely already past any sort of help, and if he wasn't, he was probably too prideful and stubborn to admit it, which ended up being about the same in the grand scheme of things.

"You know you're not going to win her over by pointing out what she's doing wrong, don't you, Prongs?" Remus asked his friend. "I mean, obviously I'm no expert on the female disposition, but whether you like it or not, Snape _is_ her friend. Would you let anyone attack me verbally to you?"

James grimaced, letting his head drop onto the mattress by Remus' hip. "No, I wouldn't. But it's different, because you are a genuinely good person, when he's not. But I don't know how to make her see that."

"Well, arguing hasn't done you much good so far," Peter pointed out. "Maybe if you tried just talking to her?"

"Like she's gonna talk to him about it _now_ , after this," Sirius said with a snort. "You've just shat the bed on getting in her knickers, Prongs."

"Thanks, Padfoot, ever so much, for that visual," James said, sounding thoroughly disgusted. Remus agreed; shit and female knickers should _not_ appear in the same sentence.

"Look, I think you guys are dead on your feet, and I don't think I'll be able to keep my eyes open for much longer," he said, a large yawn underlying his words. It also worked well in making them see just how tired they were, because it didn't take more than a second or two to infect them with it. "Can we bin this for another day?"

"Yes, lets," Peter agreed. "I feel knackered."

The other two were forced to agree with him, as James seemed to have trouble raising his head off the mattress, and Sirius had slumped in his chair until he was almost prostrate.

"Enlarge the bed?" the dog Animagus suggested. "We've not had a sleep-over in years."

"What are you talking about? We have sleepovers every night," James muttered. "We _live_ in the same room."

"Yes, but that's on separate beds. Come on, it'll be fun!"

"If you start kicking me, I'm pushing you off," Remus warned him, as James finally regained some wakefulness to pull his wand out and transfigure the bed under Remus to one that could easily fit all four of them without anyone feeling squished or otherwise uncomfortable. Sirius clambered on and plopped down so that he was on his side facing Remus, with an almost manic grin on his face; of the four of them, he was by far the worst if he'd had a sleepless night – Peter tended to nod off during the day, and James often became irritable, while Remus was usually listless (if the most aware of them all, considering the amount of practice he had with it); Sirius, by contrast, became hyperactive to the point where Remus didn't think anyone could tolerate him, let alone the three of them. It was the only times Remus could remember Sirius and James fighting.

Also, he tended to have rather insane ideas. Remus didn't even try to consider what Madam Pomfrey would think if she saw them sleeping like sardines on the enormous bed, but he did know that Sirius would never have suggested something as unmanly as this if he were in his right mind.

Then again, why the hell not? It could be like a camping trip, and Remus had always wanted to give that one a try; he'd always wanted to spend time in a wizarding tent, and that was very much out of his family's price range. He could pretend that for once in his life, he was in a forest for a reason that wasn't his furry companion.

James climbed up on Remus' other side, kicking his shoes off on the way, and Peter in the end sprawled on his back down by their feet, where he had plenty of room.

"Now, if only I could turn, this'd be perfect," Sirius said, fluffing his pillow with one hand while James dug in his pocket for that Snitch of his he'd filched from who knew where; its buzzing around their dormitory was strangely soothing for Remus, helping him fall asleep a little easier, and it did so now, too, as the ball zoomed on little golden wings around their heads. "Alas, but for those stupid Ministry rules on registration."

"I think," their fearless leader said past a yawn as Sirius reached over Remus to pluck his glasses off his nose and stretch back to put them on the nightstand, "that we make a very good team regardless."

"That we do," Peter agreed from somewhere south of where Remus' blurry line of sight ended. "That we do."

Most of them were asleep before they could hear Sirius' answer, and when Madam Pomfrey started her usual mid-day rounds, she found four exhausted teenagers sleeping on one enormous bed like four little boys who'd stubbornly refused to stop playing their children's games even when the call of sleep had become too strong to resist.

* * *

 **A/N:** Lily quotes (not verbatim, but it should be quite close) Martin Luther King Junior's words from his 'I have a dream' speech on 28. August 1963 in Washington DC (which is also why the word 'Negro' is used, because it was used by King himself, and here it was in context). Additionally, while slave trade was outlawed in Britain in 1807, the actual slavery was legal until 1833. The similarities Lily finds in the situations compared, and whether there might be more appropriate analogies that she did not think of, are a reflection of how the character perceives all of these from her limited point of view, and was intended to give some insight into the state of the Wizarding Britain's political situation (given the actual WWII connotations that exist in canon and the underlying differences between the Holocaust and slavery in America), as well as the knowledge and sensibilities of her character (I'm mentioning this because of the severity of real-life history referenced here, and possible perception of callousness by Lily in making these comparisons).

The existence of one-week Easter break I picked up from Harry Potter wikia, which is my main source of information with regards to canon.


	6. Ch I,5: The Meaning of Insignificances

**Chapter 5: The Meaning of Insignificances**

Lily found Clara Shanwick, the seventh-year Ravenclaw that Peter had pointed her towards, in the library, on Easter Day; in truth, she'd made sure to keep her eyes on the older girl all throughout their breakfast, which, with the lower number of students currently residing at Hogwarts, wasn't as difficult a task as it could have been.

Most students didn't, as a rule, go back for the Easter holidays; it was only a week, after all, hardly worth it when the ride to London was a full day on the Hogwarts Express. Mostly, it was those who lived in the northern parts of the country, and those whose parents could afford to Apparate that far to pick them up. Lily had only gone home her first year, more because she'd thought that she was supposed to miss home and want to go than because she'd truly felt like it. But even then, the truth had been obvious to her – Hogwarts was her world, not Cokeworth, and that week, spent for once without Severus by her side, had quite effectively proven that to her.

She'd stayed every year since, and once, when Severus had chosen to stay during the Christmas holidays as well (he'd never told her why, but she suspected his mother had written to warn him off), she'd chosen to stay with him, because while they were separate in school, outside of it, they were together, always.

These four days had served to remind her of that, too, to give her a little boost in accomplishing her goals; so far, the strange new kind of tension that had begun building between them since he'd told her of the Whomping Willow incident had mostly abated, and Severus' mood had improved, as well. It was not like their summers, when the rest of the world didn't intrude, but it was closer than she'd felt it be for the whole year, and it gave strength to her resolve of completely ignoring her argument with Potter and Black.

Clara Shanwick was not a pretty girl, really; her lips were too thin for it, and her forehead too large. Her hair didn't help this either, not pulled back into a haphazardly tied bun so that it only visually enlarged her face. But Lily remembered her as a kind, receptive girl, one of those Ravenclaws who didn't mind helping others, no matter the house.

The girl offered Lily a smile when she noticed her, as she placed her books on the desk; just like Lily, she seemed to be preparing for the big exams, though hers were N.E.W.T.s where Lily's were O.W.L.s.

"Hi, Clara," Lily greeted her, taking a seat at the library desk. "How are you?"

"Lily," she replied, and Lily felt a measure of relief that she'd been recognised – though Alice and Clara had been friends of some sort until Alice had graduated and left Hogwarts, their respective groups hadn't had nearly enough in common to mingle – Gryffindors and Ravenclaws, and separate ages besides. "A little stressed about the exams, but I suppose you are feeling much the same."

"Yeah," she agreed. "I didn't think it would be this bad, though."

"The O.W.L.s are easy compared to N.E.W.T.s, but by far the more boring of the two."

"That's good to know. Listen..." and here Lily stopped, because how could one come right out and _ask_ if Clara was part of the group recruiting for some sort of secret organization under Dumbledore's leadership? In the end, she chose an avenue she thought a little safer. "Have you heard from Alice recently? I've written to her, but I suppose she's quite busy these days with her Auror Training."

"Relatively recently, though it was academic in nature," Clara answered. "But you are quite right, I got the impression from her letter that she's been swamped with work."

"I suppose I should write to her about it," Lily mused out-loud, "since I'm considering perhaps also attempting to go in that direction, and it would help to know which N.E.W.T.s I'd need to take."

"Auror Training?" the other girl asked in mild surprise. "I hadn't realised. I thought your interest was in charmwork?"

"It is, but this war... frankly, I feel that anything less than would allow me to help would be a complete waste." And it was true, though she did still want to work with charms, more than she wished to be an Auror. It was simply that the thought of perhaps switching her planned careers wasn't leaving her lately. "When I started Hogwarts, it barely felt like anything important, you know, but it's just growing and growing every year, and I fear that it'll soon be truly horrible."

"Yes," Clara agreed with a grim nod. "We're protected here, sheltered, but out there, it's a completely different thing."

"I wish I could help."

Clara gave her a thoughtful look, but in the end she didn't seem to bite the bait, instead only offering a reassuring smile. "I'm sure you'll find a way; you've always seemed very resourceful."

"Thank you," Lily said, wishing that she could push but knowing it would be the wrong thing to do. Still, she had a feeling that Peter wasn't wrong in his assessment after all – perhaps Clara wasn't the one who could help her, but the older girl did know something. It was just a matter of getting it out of her. "If you hear any more from Alice, could you please let her know I'd like some information on the Auror Training?"

"I will, though I doubt it will be any time soon."

"In any case. I'll see you around."

If not Clara, then one of her friends, surely. The Head Boy and Head Girl, or those other Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs that Clara spent her time with. And as soon as she figured out which one, Lily was going to do something about it. Until then, O.W.L. preparations, tedious as they were, beckoned.

* * *

Mulciber and Avery returned spoiling for some 'old-fashioned fun', if Thistletwaithe was to be believed. Severus knew to translate that as 'having a little fun at Mudblood Gryffindor expense', and as he'd always done, he went along with it. Most of the time, it was a smidge of Dark Magic in what paralleled some of the crueller Marauder pranks, in his opinion, and really, people did make too much fuss around what was or wasn't considered Dark. In fact, in the eight years between when he'd found the first book on Dark Magic (his mother's, that appeared to be a textbook of some sort with the very basics) and today, Severus had come to the conclusion that most people who lamented about the use of Dark Magic had very little concept of what Dark Magic even _was_.

It was, in fact, why it always angered him when Lily went on one of her tangents regarding his interest in the Dark Arts. He'd offered her the textbook to read back when they'd been nine or ten, and even then, she'd heard the word 'Dark' and turned her nose up at it. It wasn't about her hatred for this branch of magic, and Severus was not so callous as to be blind to the dangers of it – Dark Magic corrupted, that was a fact that needed no debating – but the fact that she seemed to feel having anything at all to do with the Dark Arts somehow tainted him, which was just ridiculous. After all, half of the spells in general use could be considered Dark – which was why they were called hexes, jinxes and curses, instead of charms or transfiguring spells – and yet no one had a problem with them.

In the case of Severus' group of friends, he was by far the most academically inclined towards the Dark Arts. Mulciber and Philes used Dark spells, but they had as little understanding of their inner workings as they did for normal spells; Avery was versed in the nuances of Dark Magic, as well as their influence on the soul, but he seemed to like that most Dark Magic required very specific counter-spells, and performed them simply to make everyone's life a little more difficult; Thistletwaithe was, perhaps, the closest in knowledge to Severus, but he preferred to use non-Dark spells if they had roughly the similar effect – the Freezing Charm instead of the Full Body-Bind Curse, for example.

Some two or three days after classes had started again, Severus found himself sitting in the corner of the common room with Avery and Thistletwaithe, discussing the book on Dark Magic Avery had apparently gotten as a present from his parents for some secretive event he refused to divulge the nature of.

"It has a very nice section on Dark Transfiguration," Zebadiah Thistletwaithe commented, flipping the pages of the book. A Pure-blood, he was a stocky boy with honey-blonde hair and a gap between the two front teeth that always gave him something of a crooked appearance. "Oh, look at this, Snape; _Most common uses of magical creatures in Dark potions_. That sounds right up your alley."

"Also very basic," Severus noted, leaning towards the other boy to see the content list. "On the other hand, I've not managed to find much on Basilisk use in other literature. Do you mind if I copy the section for myself?" he asked Avery, who shrugged dismissively.

"Go right ahead; you know I prefer spells to potions."

"It's really not a bad book at all," Thistletwaithe decided. "A little light on comparisons, but I'd say worth a read. You sure we can't convince you to tell us what you'd gotten it for?"

The smaller boy offered a self-satisfied little grin.

"Nope; I was sworn to secrecy."

"We could just put some Veritaserum in your juice. How long would that take to brew?"

"Four weeks, if I had bluebell bulbs picked on the full moon. I suppose we could borrow them from Slughorn, he should have at least a few," Severus mused, barely containing his grin as Avery shot them a cross look.

"Don't you dare."

"Oh, come now, Aves," Thistletwaithe said. "What's a little truth serum between friends?"

For a moment, he seemed like he'd say something quite nasty, before his face morphed into his usual smirking mask. "Does that mean the next time you go off with Valentine Borgin, I can spike your drink and get you to tell me if she gives good head?"

"Why don't you ask her yourself? I'm sure she'd give you a demonstration."

Severus barely contained himself from sneering in disgust; really, what was the point of getting tangled up with someone with as loose a reputation as Valentine Borgin, Severus didn't know, and, didn't _want_ to know. Putting aside the fact that he couldn't quite imagine being with any girl other than Lily (and he'd tried a few times, simply as an experiment; all the imaginary girls just morphed into Lily about half-way into his wanking, so he'd given up on it altogether), he'd found that he held no respect for women who threw themselves at men in such a manner. Perhaps it was something he'd picked up from his mother – even after everything that she'd been through, she still had her dignity, and Severus had never seen her attempt to ingratiate herself in such a way to his father, though it might have been easier on her, considering – but he preferred girls who had self-respect.

And all this conversation about sexual acts that his peers seemed suddenly so interested in, it only served to make him uncomfortable. Part of it was that he'd never even kissed anyone in his life, let alone done anything more, of course, but more significant was the fact that he was simply a private person by nature, and sex fell firmly under the category of 'things that are no one's business by my own'. On the bright side, he doubted any of his other friends had _actually_ done half the things they mentioned, so it was a little easier to ignore some of their comments.

He let the two other boys bicker about girls while he perused the book, _The Dark Arts for Dark Days_. A pretentious title, certainly, one that would not have made him reach for the book of his own volition, but he had to admit that there were a few interesting things to be picked up from it, too. For one, the compendium about the uses of magical creatures parts was extensive, and they didn't seem to shy away from such things as unicorn blood or Basilisk venom (of course, Severus had no intention of _ever_ using unicorn blood unless a unicorn walked up to him in the Forbidden Forest and offered its leg for him to draw its blood, and even then only as a last resort, but it was good to know what all was out there – knowledge was power, as he'd quite quickly learned after being sorted into Slytherin House). There was even a section dedicated to the most famous Dark Arts experimenters known to the wizarding world, beginning with Herpo the Foul and ending with Gellert Grindelwald. Lord Voldemort wasn't in the book, but since the date of publication was 1958, that wasn't too surprising.

"So, what's the verdict on the book by the Dark Arts Walking Encyclopaedia?" Avery's question brought Severus back around to their conversation.

"I've read better," he answered with a shrug, "but on the whole, decent."

"Anything you'd be able to add to it, then?" Thistletwaithe asked, narrowing his eyes lightly. Severus, expecting the usual temptation of sharing his Dark inventions with his friends, found himself surprised when it didn't come. Or, it did come, but only as a vague twinge that had to do more with the fact that his cutting curse was the greatest accomplishment he'd done so far and thus worth sharing, than with wanting to see that calculating, slightly awed, somewhat greedy look in their eyes that always appeared when he shared with them something they found useful. Instead, what he felt was a bewildering mix of anticipation to share his Toenail-Growing and Fingernail-Growing Hexes with Dumbledore and disappointment that he couldn't do the same with _Sectum Semprus_ , because it was a whole other league of Dark from the keratin growers. And that feeling made him lose his train of thought as he tried to process it; partly, it was to be expected, considering how much Dumbledore's advice had been helping him in this regard. But his discomfort with it came from another place entirely – ever since the first weeks as a Slytherin, Severus had used his knowledge, Dark Arts and otherwise, to impress his friends, and it was one of the biggest driving forces, next to pure curiosity and the thrill of the challenge, behind his invention of new spells. So what did it say about his motivations towards his knowledge base and his feelings towards the old Headmaster in regards to trust, that he was more interested in sharing his progress with _him_ than with the friends who'd been in on it since day one?

"...to lose their mind?"

"Huh?" Severus muttered, realising not only that he'd completely lost track of the conversation, but that he'd also not noticed the arrival of Mulciber and Philes.

"Oh, _now_ he hears us," Avery shot with a shake of his head.

"Come on, lift your lazy arses, girlies," Philes said with a smirk, "Mulc and I found us a nice little treat." Tallest of the lot, Boromir Philes was an unkempt presence with shaggy brown hair, pock-marked face, and by far the nastiest tongue. Where he thought Mulciber neither here nor there, Avery tolerable, and Thistletwaithe downright excellent company, Severus could barely stand Philes, and suspected that at least Thistletwaithe thought the same.

"Which is?" Avery asked, first to get to his feet; Severus and Thistletwaithe followed suit.

"A group of Gryffindors."

Said group of Gryffindors was to be found in one of the large study rooms near the library, and consisted of mostly fourth-years, if Severus was remembering his students correctly (it helped that four out of six were girls, and he'd seen none of them near Lily's group, which consisted of fifth-years and older).

"So, what's the plan, then?" Thistletwaithe asked quietly as the five of them congregated some distance from the study room entrance.

"They'll be coming out soon for lunch," Avery noted, a grin spreading over his face. "I say we do something memorable."

A little conferring, and they were agreed on a plan. Thistletwaithe, as the best one with charmwork, managed a passable Disillusionment Charm on them – not even near complete invisibility, but if they kept to the shadowy nooks and crannies of the hallway, they weren't going to be noticed easily – and they lay in wait, Mulciber, Avery and Philes on the one side of the corridor, and Thistletwaithe and Severus on the other.

"What'd you think he had to do to get that book?" the blonde boy asked quietly, and Severus rolled his eyes in answer, though Thistletwaithe probably couldn't see him.

"What _could_ he've done in five days that he was home?" he replied.

"We could get Cain to tell us."

"Certainly would be easier; Mulciber's tongue is fond of flapping. Though I'm not sure he'd know."

"Terence Avery, doing something without Mulciber's approval? Is the sky falling down?"

Thistletwaithe had a point, of course; Avery, while far more intelligent, was something of a passive person, usually participating but not instigating. Still, ever since he'd begun meeting with the Headmaster and thus keeping a more wary eye on his friends, Severus had gotten the impression that something wasn't quite right with those two. Nothing overt, obviously, but if he was to guess, he'd have said that Avery was getting tired of Mulciber's thick-headedness when it came to certain situations.

"So, what did _you_ do over the holiday?"

"Studied," Severus replied, trying not to sound cagey. Thistletwaithe had an excellent ear for such things.

"Spent time with your Mudblood?"

"We're study partners," he retorted, clenching his teeth against hearing that word applied to Lily.

"Ah, yes. The ever-convincing study partnering."

"She's wiping the floor with you in Charms," Severus pointed out defensively, "and you tell me who else from our year is as good in potionwork as I am, except for her."

"Oh, I'm sure you're absolutely right," the other boy said in a very carefree manner. "You want 'Outstandings' on O.W.L.s, and she's the one to get you there."

Irate, Severus opened his mouth to give the other boy a vicious reply for the insult in that sentence – the nerve of him, to imply that Severus was so incompetent that he couldn't get 'Outstandings' without the help of a _Mudblood_ (Severus didn't give two shits about Lily's blood status, but Thistletwaithe did, and to him, needing help from any Muggle-born was tantamount to utter humiliation) – only to be stopped in the last moment by a stray thought of _you're letting your anger control you, Mr Snape_ , said in Dumbledore's pointed voice.

So, though swallowing his first retort felt like he was swallowing glass, Severus made himself recite the ingredient list for the Drought of the Living Death until the first intense wave of anger passed, and he could see what a colossal mistake it would have been to respond sharply to this, because it was exactly what the other boy was expecting.

Instead, he let out a derisive snort and shifted to lean a little more against the wall.

"If that's the kind of compliments you give, Zebadiah, you better start looking towards the other half of the Slytherin populace, because you're sure not getting birds with that mouth."

Thistletwaithe's outline shimmered as he reared back, and Severus smirked as it came to him that he'd managed to completely nonplus the other boy.

"You _dare_ –" But then Thistletwaithe shut up mid-sentence, and Severus thought to himself that if they were going to play this game of round-about implications, Thistletwaithe was going to get as good as he gave. Apparently, that was also dawning on him, too, because after a moment of tense silence, he spoke again, this time in a calmer voice. "Fair enough; though, seriously, Snape, you know I'm the first to agree that Mudbloods _do_ have their uses, and your broad really is something. I bet that face is a sight, with those lips of hers wrapped round–"

But before Thistletwaithe could finish that sentence and snap what little control Severus had managed to wrangle from his anger, one of the Gryffindors they were waiting for emerged, and the blond shifted his focus immediately to her. Severus, meanwhile, found his jaw clenched so tightly he heard his teeth grinding, and thank Merlin he'd not yet pulled his wand out of his pocket, because his hands were fisted so tightly he felt nails cutting skin. The very thought of Thistletwaithe _imagining_ what Lily would look like in such an act as he'd implied was maddening, and even knowing he'd said that to provoke Severus wasn't enough to make him see through his anger. The only thing that _was_ , was the knowledge that a violent reaction might feel good, but would reveal his true feelings for Lily to someone who'd have no compunction about using it, just like Dumbledore had said that first day, and it was this knowledge that kept him frozen in spite of his instinctive urge to strike back.

Therefore, it took Severus some time to form a clear thought in his head that he needed to unclench his hand and pull out his wand, by which time the rest of the Gryffindors had exited the study room and Philes had cast his first spell – a hex that made the target's ears ring continuously and painfully, that hit one of the two Gryffindor boys, making him wince sharply and stumble in his step; he followed this up in quick succession with the Conjunctivitis Curse targeted at the girl closest to his position. Thistletwaithe was right behind him with _Anteoculatia_ , that made the girl it hit sprout enormous antlers from the top of her head, while Mulciber used the Dark version of _Furnunculus_ on the other boy, the kind that couldn't be removed nearly as easily with the Boil Cure. Finally getting his wand out, Severus unleashed his anger through the Hair-Loss Curse, that made the tallest girl from the group shed her auburn locks, leaving her head completely bald, just as Avery's Knee-Reversal Hex hit the last girl, making her completely lose her balance and crash into one Philes had targeted, who went down with a loud cry. All of this took mere seconds, really, because after years of casting together, the Slytherin boys knew how to coordinate well.

It took a few moments for the Gryffindors to realise what had happened, but when they did, utter pandemonium erupted that was quite entertaining – the two girls whose heads were affected by the spells began shrieking, trying to cover their baldness and antlers with their hands and tripping over one another in their haste to escape the looks of the gradually growing river of people that were heading to the Great Hall, while the other two remained hopelessly tangled on the ground, with the one on the bottom unable to see anything from her swollen eyes, and the one on the top panicking so badly she couldn't seem to understand how her knees were inside-out, let alone how to coordinate herself on them. Of the two boys, the one with boils was clutching his face, while the other one was holding his hands over his ears, both bent over and seemingly completely unaware of anything around them, least of all the gawking and even intermittent laughter of the crowd.

The Slytherins, knowing better than to stay, slipped into the mass of people around them, keeping to the edges of the corridor where their Disillusioned forms wouldn't be as likely to cause someone to run into them. Severus, his anger given an outlet, could finally think a little easier, so that when they entered the boys' toilet in order for Thistletwaithe to remove the Disillusionment Charm, he felt capable of addressing the tooth-gapped boy without hexing him to oblivion.

"That was hilarious," Avery said with a grin. "I wonder how long it'll take the one to grow her hair back. Thistle, was that one yours?"

"No, mine was the other one; the hair loss one was Snape."

"Right on, mate," Philes exclaimed, slapping Severus on the back so hard the other Slytherin felt for a moment as if his bones were vibrating.

The four boys exited the toilet in a group, laughing about the prank and congratulating one another as they headed for lunch; Severus, however, found himself lagging behind, as the sight of those dark reddish-brown locks lying on the ground filled the space left by his expelled anger. It was nothing like Lily's, mostly brown with just a tinge of red where Lily's had the deep, vivid shades of the setting sun, but somehow he couldn't quite disassociate the two, and it left him feeling discomposed.

And that discomfort didn't leave him for a long while after, either – perhaps exactly because a part of him, the part that yearned to be worthy of Lily's _you're worth it, Sev_ , the part that Dumbledore was, slowly but surely, almost against Severus' will, coaxing to the surface, the same part that created such horrid associations between the girl he'd targeted and Lily, _that_ part knew that his actions would only bring disappointment and shame to her eyes.

He'd not truly thought much of it, really, when he'd joined in on Mulciber's and Philes' plan today. But, as the day turned to night, he found himself unable to _stop_ thinking on it, as it dawned on him that these actions were choices of the kind that would push Lily away from him even more, of the kind that made Dumbledore's words – _the easiest way of losing those who are important to us is by refusing to consider how our choices impact them_ – almost prophetic.

And he didn't quite know how to handle that, because these were his friends, and these were things they'd done for years, and in the end, this _was_ him. And it was something he knew (though he'd never truly wanted to admit it to himself) led him away from the path he was so desperately clawing to keep in sight.

This was the core of his conflict, the core of Dumbledore's question, and Severus was beginning to accept that there would be no reconciliation between the two – so much as he'd, perhaps, hoped, it was finally hitting him that once the moment of choice came, he would only be able to tread one of these paths, and that there would be no turning back.

* * *

Lily ended up mostly avoiding her Gryffindor friends for a week or two after classes resumed; she spent enough time with them to not arouse concern, of course, but it was a little hard to avoid Potter's group when Mary and Bettina seemed determined to place themselves within shouting distance of the boys, to say nothing of Potter's continued attempts to approach Lily.

Frankly, it was becoming bloody tiring.

The bright spot about it was Remus, who seemed to play a sort-of intermediary role for her in this – on the one hand, the other girls, no doubt having picked up signs over the years, were a little weary of him, or at the very least weren't comfortable speaking openly in front of him, and so tended to leave Lily and Remus to their studying; on the other, it appeared that Potter considered Remus to be some sort of bridge between him and Lily, and that if she wasn't tolerant of _him_ , at least she was tolerant of _someone_ he considered a very close friend. For his part, Remus seemed extremely focused on O.W.L. preparation, and Lily found herself covering more material in one sitting with him than she even did with Severus, which wasn't a bad thing, especially if she really ended up deciding to take some more N.E.W.T.s later on.

The first overture of Remus' that didn't involve studying came near the end of April, right after lunch, when Lily was finished with checking her things in order to be off for the arranged study session with Severus in the library. Remus caught up with her as she exited the Great Hall, falling in step with her and giving her a somewhat uncertain smile.

"Lily? I was wondering what you were doing tomorrow."

"Studying, I suppose," she answered with a shrug. "Did you want to do it together?"

"Actually, I was thinking that maybe we could go exploring the castle a bit?" Remus suggested. "I wanted to check out the east section."

"The one we aren't supposed to go to? Why, Remus, I thought you were one of us good guys!" Lily exclaimed with a grin, finding the idea appealing; in the last two months, she'd quite grown to like the studious sandy-haired boy, to the point that she regretted not approaching him sooner. She felt like he was a friend in more than just the name to her, these days.

Self-conscious, Remus shrugged. "I _am_ friends with James, Sirius and Peter for a reason."

"Ok, I'm up for it," she agreed. "After breakfast? Will Laurel and Hardy let you go for that long?"

"I don't let them control me _that_ much."

"Right," Lily agreed perfunctorily. "I've got to run, but we can go snooping about tomorrow."

In the library, Severus was already set up at their table in the corner, though as had become usual since she'd learned of what Potter and Black had almost done to him, he seemed extremely preoccupied with something Lily didn't seem privy to.

"Where've you been?" he asked when she dropped into her designated chair and began pulling out books on the History of Magic.

"Remus needed to talk to me," she answered distractedly, trying to remember if she'd packed those notes from their second year that she'd wanted to review. She thought she'd put them in her bag, but maybe she'd left them among her many stacks at her little desk in the Girls' Quarters. Dammit, she was supposed to have checked for that.

"Since when are you such friends with _him_?"

The bitterness in his voice pulled her out of her head, so that she looked up with a frown, only then having the sinking realisation that it wasn't promising to be a good day – he appeared quite irritable today, if the scowl on his face was anything to go by, and no doubt her comments about Remus were going to only make things worse.

She'd thought, after that relaxing week off, that thing were looking up as far as their interactions went, but it had become obvious in the following weeks that this was not the case, and today only served to continue that pattern; perhaps that was partly why she found herself responding tersely to him, as much as she didn't want to. She'd been trying to stop herself from doing it, having grown more and more aware of the way she was treating him – snappily, and sometimes even unfairly, because he annoyed her. She just wasn't quite sure she was succeeding.

"I've always been friends with him," she pointed out. "And unlike _you_ , Remus actually appreciates my advice when we study together."

He opened his mouth to say something, then shut it and turned his eyes downwards to his notes, and she huffed in impotent fury as that bizarre behaviour of his reasserted itself yet again. Before – before the Incident, before that first time he'd pulled away from her, before everything – he'd argued his point to its stubborn end, no matter how wrong he was or how little right he had to it. For the last almost two months (even during the Easter holiday, though perhaps in lesser measure), this reserve and closing off was all she'd been getting from him, and it was starting to drive her up the wall.

This Saturday, though, she'd told herself she wouldn't let it rattle her, and that meant ignoring this invisible pink elephant in the room that she didn't even truly understand enough to address. So she took a deep breath, expelled it, and turned to their History of Magic preparation.

Mostly, it was all right. Neither of them enjoyed History of Magic, and so any minor disagreements they had were argued only half-heartedly at best, and the peace mostly remained, at least until they'd decided to pack it up for dinner.

"Lily, do you even care what he is?" Severus asked her softly, the words directed more to himself than to her.

"I care in as much as I need to remember to stay away from him during the full moon," she answered with a roll of her eyes. "What else would you like me to care about?"

"How about the fact that he almost mauled me to death?"

"Severus, there are two people most at fault in that, and neither of them is Remus, all right? He needs better friends, and so do you, and I'm going to be that better friend for the both of you, so if you wouldn't mind stopping with this line of questioning, that'd be swell."

And, once again, it was so jarring that he actually, _actually_ heeded her request and shut up. She'd expected an outburst, though in hindsight she didn't quite know why, when he'd not reacted like that in weeks. Maybe because the whole issue with Potter's gang, which included Remus, was something she'd always thought of as one of those enormous triggers for him.

Sighing deeply again and finding it within her to just let it all go, she packed up her things and offered him a mostly false smile.

"Well, I'll see you tomorrow afternoon."

"Aren't we brewing tomorrow morning?"

Oh, shite. She'd completely forgotten that she'd promised he could use her pass for one of the small laboratories to do experiments.

"I can't stay, I'm sorry, something's come up. I'll let you into the laboratory, and Professor Slughorn never checks anyway, so it'll be fine, you can still do your thing."

"What's come up since yesterday?" he asked, disbelieving.

"Just... something I need to do," she fibbed, knowing just how well the truth would go over, and not really wanting to ruin what had mostly turned out to be a nice afternoon. "I'm sorry, I'd stay with you, but this is important."

"What, Lily? What's so very important that you don't even want to tell me about it, huh?" he demanded, rounding on her, and the words come out even before she'd thought them, certainly well before she would have remembered what she'd decided just moments before.

"Remus and I are doing a thing, ok? What's the big deal, anyway? All you'll be doing is muttering to yourself while you stare at the cauldrons, and I'll just end up making suggestions you don't even hear! I'll help you get into the laboratory, and you can do your experiments in peace, and I'll do the thing with Remus, and in the afternoon we can study again."

But there was disappointment and betrayal in his eyes, and Lily couldn't help but think that she'd misunderstood something about their plans tomorrow, and that she'd hurt him because of it, though for the life of her, she couldn't understand what that was.

"Fine. Fine, do what you wish," he said, shoving his things in his bag violently. "It's what you always do anyway," he threw as a parting shot, fairly fleeing her sight and leaving her to stare, stunned, after him and wonder what in the name of Merlin's soggy beard had gotten _into_ him.

Sometimes, her best friend was so exasperating she just wanted to scream, and she was beginning to feel it was hardly worth the stress, when he left her aching in frustration and tired to her bones.

* * *

"Severus, sit down," Dumbledore said, sounding a touch exasperated that evening after Severus had almost stormed into his office in a towering rage. Huffing, the Slytherin plopped down into the ugly armchair and rubbed his forehead to try and relieve his tension headache at least a little. It didn't happen, of course, but some actions were quite ingrained and weren't worth fighting against. "Now, what's happened today?"

"Lily is what happened," he shot back, angry and afraid and betrayed and a hundred other things that he'd gotten a reprieve from for those few precious days and that were now back with a vengeance, even worse than before in light of his terrifying realisation about what it _actually_ meant to pick a side. "She completely forgot that we'd agreed to brew together tomorrow, and arranged _something_ with that werewolf!"

"Did you think to reschedule, perhaps?"

Shooting the man a death glare, Severus growled. "We'd agreed first! She'd _forgotten_ , don't you see? She'd forgotten that we'd agreed, and it's– it's–"

"Severus, are you upset with her for that, or for choosing to continue her friendship with Mr Lupin?"

"He's a werewolf! He's dangerous, and he's part of Potter's _fucking_ –"

"Language."

"–group, and she _knows_ what they did to me! Why would she–"

"Unfortunately, Mr Snape," Dumbledore interrupted him with a pointed look, "there is little young, opinionated witches like less than someone telling them what to do and whom to befriend. I suspect that if you continue pushing the issue, Miss Evans won't take it well."

"Don't you think I know that?!"

He ended up almost panting in impotent fury, but at least Dumbledore wasn't making any more useless comments, so Severus could work on trying to contain his temper. It was mostly a futile task, really, but it was either that or let it out again, and after that spectacular bit of destruction he'd pulled off last month, he didn't think he would be able to face the old wizard for the rest of his life if he did it again.

"Severus, will you tell me what has hurt you so?" Dumbledore's soft voice asked, gently.

"It's so _hard_ ," he whispered, fisting his hair and tugging lightly, just enough for the pain to pull him back from his anger. "I can't even speak with her anymore, I keep second-guessing myself, and then if I don't, she walks away. It's all she ever does, walks away from me, and _everything_ is on the line, but I can't– I don't know how to–"

"Have you told her this?"

Blinking, the stupidity of the question finally breaking through his anger where even pain couldn't, Severus looked up at the wizened blue eyes and realised that he'd been having his talk with _Albus bloody Dumbledore_ of all people, that in the miasma of negativity he'd forgotten his wariness of the man and had revealed so much of himself to someone who was powerful enough to use it against him in ways Severus was sure he couldn't even imagine.

That he'd forgotten it to the point that he'd come to Dumbledore in his anger, when they'd not even had a session scheduled for the evening, was perhaps the most distressing of all. Why in the world would he have done that, why? Had he unconsciously thought the old wizard could fix his problems somehow? Or had he simply felt the need to vent, and the only one who knew even a fraction of his feelings for Lily was the Headmaster of Hogwarts? Even that possibility seemed frightening, because it was one thing to share intellectual conversations and knowledge with the man, and quite another to share his deepest emotions; the possibility of being manipulated through them was something that froze him stiff, when he let his mind wander in that painfully familiar direction.

"No, I– I'd rather not discuss it anymore," he said stiffly, trying to force his turbulent thought about Dumbledore to the back of his mind, not wishing for the man to pick up on them.

Dumbledore sighed and leaned back in the chair, and there seemed to be sadness in his eyes as he looked at Severus.

"Sometimes, we think we see clearly, even when we do not. Perhaps especially when we do not. And those that know us best are often those that see the truth the last. Miss Evans is an observant young witch, but I fear that you are expecting of her something that she might not be able to deliver. All I can offer you on this point is my advice that you speak with her about it tomorrow and attempt to explain to her why you feel this as her rejection of you. And, I hope you will consider this, Mr Snape: perhaps being certain that she has understood your point will make you feel better regardless of her choices."

Severus didn't think so, but the fact was that he'd not thought a lot of things in the past six weeks that seemed, in hindsight, quite obvious, so perhaps he was wrong in this, too. There was a part of him that wanted to take Lily to task for not understanding how precious he found the times when they had total privacy, when he could relax and not worry about the outside world for a few hours. It had become _so_ hard to find any place or situation where he could simply let everything else go and just be, especially now when Dumbledore's words and his fears had made him be on guard even among his friends. With each passing day, he was finding himself _needing_ that place more and more, needing the reprieve, no matter how small, and Lily was a vital part of his calm. In spite of all the difficulties in their relationship, Lily was the centre of the storm, the only person with whom Severus felt he could stay forever, the one whom Severus showed most of himself to.

It all felt so hopeless, though, and pointless. All this, the lessons with Dumbledore that were going nowhere, the struggle between Lily and the Slytherins, the continued battle with the Marauders. He just wanted it all to _stop_.

"Severus, tell me one of your precious memories."

Looking up at the Headmaster, Severus frowned and thought, nonplussed by the demand enough to allow himself to be distracted by it.

A precious memory.

Perhaps exactly because he was yearning for the simpler times, one specific memory sprang to mind, clear and pure as the snow it contained – Lily's and his first winter, long before Hogwarts. They'd spent the day making all manner of furniture out of snow, and a snowman, too, and Lily had insisted on teaching him how to make a snow angel, as well, so that, in the end, they'd ended up lying on the snow in their winter gear, head to head, and waving their arms and legs about. It had been the first time she'd grabbed his hand, after they'd been done, as they'd just stared up at the darkening sky and the falling snow.

It was an old memory, worn out around the edges, murky in parts, faded in others. But he'd felt so very simple back then; in that memory, Lily had not looked once at his threadbare coat and his stitched up mittens, had smiled like the sun when she'd seen him wearing that scarf she'd given him for his tenth birthday, the one he still pulled out and hugged when he was feeling particularly down, and nothing else had mattered.

He described it for the Headmaster as best he could, and the wizard asked for more and more details that Severus grasped to remember, and only later did he understand that Dumbledore had used that – one of the good things in his life, that filled him with soft joy – to engage him and distract him from his anger until it had gone back to the embers that it usually was, a technique that seemed like the only line of defence Severus would ever truly have against his inner rage.

"Now, since you're here, we might as well make a session out of it, mightn't we? Try using that memory to create a Patronus. Hold on to the way it makes you feel, the way it inspires you still. It is truly a beautiful memory, Mr Snape."

Swallowing in nervousness, Severus pulled out his wand and closed his eyes to bring forth the memory, the sting of cold on his cheeks and nose, the unpleasantly tingling sensation in his backside, and the warmth of Lily's small fingers clutching his, that had heated him up from inside until he thought he'd be red as a tomato.

" _Expecto Patronum_!"

And this time, to his amazement, a silvery fog burst out of his wand and spread in front of him, shimmering the way Dumbledore's Patronus had shimmered. Indistinct, without a form, but more than he'd ever been able to produce.

"I can do it," escaped him in a sigh as he stared at the mist that was slowly vanishing into the air around him. "I can do it."

"Very good, my boy!" Dumbledore said with a big smile, eyes twinkling madly. "That was very well done!"

It barely registered, really, the epithet, in his stunned mind, but it made his hands shake nonetheless.

"It's only mist," he stammered, not knowing what to do with himself and his exhilaration and his subconscious terror at the words 'my boy' containing so much pride in them.

"Ah, but it is proof that you, indeed, _can_ do it, Severus, and expecting more than that for your first tries is unrealistic in any case; we all start with incorporeal Patronuses when we learn."

Smiling disbelievingly, Severus met Dumbledore's eyes.

"I'd started to think..."

Rising to his feet, Dumbledore placed his wrinkled hand on Severus' shoulder, and it felt like static electricity, making Severus' spine straighten in shock, because it seemed to be the day for firsts.

The old man had never touched him before.

"You are not defective, Mr Snape," he insisted firmly. "Soon enough, you will master this, and so long as you do not give up, I will be there with you every step of the way. Now," the old wizard said, straightening properly and giving Severus space to rise, as well, "off to bed with you, and give my advice regarding Miss Evans some thought. Remember why you are doing this."

"I will," Severus promised sincerely. "I will."


	7. Ch I,6: The Advance of Reliance

**Chapter 6: The Advance of Reliance**

On Sunday after breakfast, Lily hurried down to the dungeons to meet with Severus and let him into the private laboratory Slughorn had reserved for her before she was to meet Remus at the library. It was somewhat of a trek, but she felt it would do her good (especially the return trip, as she suspected Severus would still be angry with her).

He was there, of course, standing in the shadows where she needed to seek him out in order to see him. Pulling her wand out, she tapped it against the door and murmured the password, letting herself and him in.

"Sev, listen, I–" she began.

"Lily, I need to–" he began.

Both falling silent, Lily released an embarrassed chuckle and motioned for him to go first. He nodded and took a deep breath, visibly preparing himself, and it immediately made her insides sink in dread.

"I need to tell you that..." He fell silent, face twisting in a frustrated scowl as he grasped for words.

"Sev, it's fine."

"It's not _fine_ ," he growled, beginning to pace. "You _forgot_! And I need to tell you this, so _please_."

"Shutting up," she murmured, guilt beginning to rise as she watched him agonise over this. Finally, he took another breath and turned to her again.

"It's not about the brewing, Lily, it's about doing it together. I wanted us to do it together for once without me having to look over my shoulder constantly."

"What do you mean by that?" she asked, trying to parse it out. Was that what he'd been doing in the past several weeks? Who was he looking for? Potter and Black, for revenge? But, had her knowing about the Incident made any difference to those two?

"Don't pretend you don't understand," he replied, crossing his arms over his chest.

"I don't. Honestly. Sev, please, I want to understand, but you're not making sense to me. I certainly can't do anything about Potter and his friends, so why would it matter if I kn–"

"The Slytherins, Lily! It's about the Slytherins."

"What?"

He growled again, an exasperated sound that told her he'd been expecting her to understand and that she was failing him. Her ire rose at the thought that he was trying to make her feel guilty for not knowing what he meant, when he was the one not explaining it properly. She wasn't a mind-reader, for Merlin's sake!

"Severus! Stop circling around it and just say what you mean!"

Stepping closer to her, he gave her a look that she didn't quite know how to interpret, somewhere between angry and desperate and disappointed.

"What do you think they'd do if they knew how much time you and I spend together?"

"Because I'm a Mudblood," she translated.

"Because you're Muggle-born," he corrected her with insistence. "They're already on me as is, I can't afford to–"

"Is that what I am to you?" she interrupted him, clenching her fists at her sides. "A dirty little secret?"

"No, Lily, that's not what I–"

"Because that's exactly what it sounds like to me! You said, you _said_ , that it didn't matter! _You said_!"

And she could pinpoint the exact moment when that wall between them rose up, as Severus clammed up and stepped away from you.

"This was a stupid idea," he muttered, turning away from her to start setting up his cauldron. "Forget I said anything."

"No! No, you can't just say something like that and expect me to be ok with it! You're the one who's been insisting that we're best friends, and that means we don't hide our friendship!"

"Oh, so you _don_ _'_ _t_ hide it?" he shot back, whirling away from the cauldron to glare at her. "You don't tell your girlfriends that you're somewhere else, when you're actually with me? I'm the only one who's pretending, is that right?"

"No, I–"

But, of course, he was right, because she _was_ doing it, too; it was simply easier than having to constantly listen to Bettina's and now Mary's complaining (it was why she'd liked Alice so much, even though the girl was the oldest of their group – she'd never meddled in Lily's business, the way the others liked to do).

"I thought so," Severus said, stepping away from her.

"It's not like that. They nag, all right? They nag, and it's just easier to–"

"So, you can have it easier, but I can't? Is that it?"

"All right," she conceded, though it stung. It stung that he'd turned the tables on her so proficiently for what had to have been one of the first times in her life, it stung that he didn't want to admit their friendship in public, and it stung that it possibly meant his friendship (if one could call it that) with those horrible Slytherins was more important to him than his friendship with her. "All right, I get it, and I'm sorry that I'd forgotten. I'll remember next time."

"You... you will?" he asked, all fight draining out of him and leaving him the Sev that he'd gradually grown into since they'd started Hogwarts, the one that she knew how to deal with – quiet and eager and hopeful and shy.

"I promise," she answered. "But Sev, it's not about... you aren't... ashamed of me, are you?" she asked, beginning strong but ending in a whisper. Immediately, his eyes widened and he began shaking his head forcefully.

"No, Lily! I could never be ashamed of you, I promise I couldn't! It's just... I need things to be easier, too, and you of all people should understand."

She did understand; the problem was that she now had a feeling that they were driving their friendship deeper into the shadows, and the more they did, the more she felt out of her element and closer to that darkness she knew was in him, the one that made him like the Dark Arts and made him collude with those no-good boys who used it freely. She didn't want their friendship there, she wanted it in the light, where she could try and keep him away from that path he seemed to be thinking about.

Swallowing, feeling odd-footed, Lily offered him a conciliatory smile and grabbed her bag.

"I'll try to finish this as soon as I can, and come back before lunchtime. That way we'd still have a little time left."

"I... I'd like that," he said, though more to himself than to her. Nodding, Lily turned her back to him and walked out of the little room, trying to get rid of this strange sense of discombobulation what was clouding her mind. It felt like things were shifting under her feet, like their friendship was going through some sort of earthquake, and she had absolutely no idea what to do to stop it from crumbling to pieces under the strain.

One thing was for certain; she needed to do _something_ , and soon, before it was too late.

* * *

Remus seemed surprisingly high-spirited when Lily arrived at their arranged meeting spot by the library entrance, looking almost unrecognisable for one bewildering moment that served well to pull her out of her brooding thoughts on her friendship with Severus. Giving him a friendly smile as he joined her so that they could be off to their exploration, Lily found the distraction exactly what she needed right now.

"You're in a good mood," she noted once they'd matched their walking pace.

"It's a good day," Remus answered.

"Really? Do tell. Oh, is it a girl?!"

Remus blushed, and she grinned widely, but he only shook his head.

"Oh, come on! I know it is."

"Lily. It's not," he said, voice sincere. "I just... it's nothing."

"Tell me, please? Pretty please?"

That made him laugh, and Lily felt good about herself for the first time that morning. At least there was _someone_ she was good at being friends with.

"You'll think it silly."

"I promise I won't."

He gave her a pointed look, but sighed in a resigned way that meant he'd be telling her after all.

"I'm just happy that we're friends, is all."

Frowning in confusion, Lily looked up at him and waited for a clarification.

"As should be quite obvious, I'm not... used... to having many friends. Back in first year, James and Sirius were the ones who sort of... insinuated themselves in my life. I just... I'd never really made a friend on my own, and I know what you said, I know we're friends already, but it's..."

Oh, Merlin, he was effectively breaking her heart to the point where her eyes almost watered. She'd known Remus didn't have a large circle of people around him, but to see him getting so much happiness out of simply gaining one more... It wasn't silly at all; it was heart-breaking and anger-inducing, and it convinced her that even though she felt bad about forgetting her plans with Severus for the day and upsetting him in the process, she hadn't actually made the wrong choice in deciding to spend time with Remus today instead.

"It's the farthest thing from silly," she told him sincerely. "Now, come on; such a good day should be used accordingly."

They wandered up to the fourth floor and snuck away to the eastern section of the castle, that'd been declared off limits during the welcoming feast. Nothing so dangerous this year – Alice had mentioned that in her first year at Hogwarts, there had been a section of the castle cordoned off for several Bicorns that Professor Kettleburn had needed for something and with whom that year's DADA instructor had had such a nasty run-in that he'd not been able to come back to teach – but it was obviously not intended for students to wander about it.

"So, how does one usually dig up a hidden passageway?" Lily asked Remus once they were a little bit deeper into the castle section and Remus had stopped to rummage through his bag. "And what are you looking for, anyway?"

"This," he answered, pulling out a very Muggle-looking drawing book and a pencil that made Lily blink in surprise.

"Is that... Muggle stuff?"

"Don't tell me you don't have anything Muggle with you," he replied in surprise, and Lily was forced to shrug. She didn't, as a matter of fact; the first year of Hogwarts had taught her that anything even remotely Muggle-looking would get her endless teasing, and so she'd just decided to stick to Wizarding products. "I want to make a map of the section," he explained. "Just a floorplan."

"Trying to map Hogwarts?"

"Something like that," he confirmed. "As for the hidden passageways, well, I suppose the easiest way is to ask the portraits. If they find you interesting, they're very willing to help. Barring that, you have to be very observant of your surroundings; there's always something to mark the entrance, but it's often too well hidden for casual glances. Inconsistencies in stone patterns; minute differences in the position of paintings, suits of armour, busts and such; cracks in the walls. The passageways mostly make sense within the castle's infrastructure; there are several that use wizardspace, but you can't be going up and end up in the dungeons, that sort of thing. And, if all else fails, Hogwarts is willing to help. But we won't do it now, unless it's obvious, otherwise it'd take days; I only want to mark the layout."

"All right," she agreed with a nod, finding this to be a fun thought; she'd not gone exploring the castle since her second year.

Remus seemed to be already quite practiced in this; they began with the corridor they were in, and each door they opened, he'd stop, assess the room's size and intended purpose, and scribble it lightly in the sketchbook. He was quite good at judging distances and dimensions, too, the benefit of which Lily saw when certain inconsistencies began to appear in the drawing. His explanation for them was that they could be either hidden rooms or passageways, or that it could simply be a very thick wall, which meant that he left these sorts of discoveries for after he'd consolidated the map fully.

They continued in this exploratory manner for a while, chatting for once not about their classes, but their hobbies and interests. To Lily's surprise, Remus's favourite subject was Defence Against the Dark Arts, and he seemed to have a liking for noir mystery novels, expounding on the genius of a wizarding detective series centred on Private Investigator Norville Flosslax, written by Germaine Lassiter. Lily, who'd never read it, found herself quite intrigued by the idea, even promising to read the four published books over the summer hols.

Somehow, their conversation segued from book genres they liked to historical fiction, and from there into political messages in such books, until finally, they circled around to political activism.

"I'd thought you'd have taken Emmeline Pankhurst as inspiration, rather than Martin Luther King, Jr," Remus commented.

"Why, because I'm a woman, and not black?"

Remus shrugged. "I suppose that too; it'd be closer to you, certainly. But, I also meant because she was British, fighting here, whereas he was an American, over the pond."

"She got too radical for my taste. In the beginning, yeah, and I do understand that sometimes, to achieve something, you need to be radical in your approaches, but... I don't know. I've not read much about her, but from what I did, I felt like she'd started thinking like a man, and that simply felt wrong."

"But it was the only way that she could be understood by men."

"But that's exactly the point," Lily argued, "we're different, but we're all deserving of the same things. If I have to resort to the other side's tactics to get what I want, then what's the point in the first place? It means I'd had to change myself to gain something, and I'd gotten it under false pretences."

Remus inclined his head thoughtfully for a moment. "I see what you mean," he decided, "but I still think sometimes drastic action is necessary, and in that case, it most certainly was."

"Maybe. I don't know, though; it just seems like whenever it comes to drastic action, far too many people get hurt."

"Sometimes, that's the only way to fight. That's what revolutions are, and I don't think drastic progress can be made without revolutions."

"That's how Voldemort's supporters think," she pointed out. "And I'd rather not agree with them."

"In conflict, someone will always get hurt. It's naïve not to think so."

Remus did have a point, of course, and Lily understood it. She just didn't _like_ it.

"In any case, I think it's about perception," she commented instead. "What Emmeline Pankhurst had her women do made everyone else think that women were _less_ deserving of votes for being arsonists and destroying property, not more. I know it's paradoxical, considering she did manage to get them voting rights in the end, but violence creates a very bleak image, and I don't think you can build anything good on fear and resentment."

"What else was there to do, though? Obviously, their other efforts weren't bearing fruit," Remus reminded her, closing his sketch book as they exited the room to follow down the corridor. "How are _you_ managing with peaceful convincing?"

Stopping in her step abruptly, Lily stared at Remus with a sinking feeling of betrayal in her chest. She'd thought – she'd _really_ thought – that Remus was the one person who'd understand, at least enough not to ask her this, that of all the Gryffindors, he'd respect her thoughts and feelings enough not to try and convince her of the futility of pulling Severus out of that cesspool of bigotry that was his group of friends.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"I'm genuinely interested," the other Gryffindor answered, stopping in his step a little in front of her and turning back to offer a conciliatory look. "To be honest, Snape doesn't seem like someone who'd be open to that sort of discussion."

He wasn't, which was exactly why Lily felt so desperate to change his mind. Severus was very single-minded – when he had an idea in his head, it was going to be like that, and getting him to do it differently was like trying to move a mountain. A Sisyphean task, really. And she was tired of it, tired of the fights and the arguments and his blindness to the way in which the actions of his friends went against everything she stood for, the way their views were warping his.

He'd promised her, once upon a time, that her blood wouldn't matter, and maybe it didn't, between them, but wider? He'd admitted it himself, just hours ago, that it was a problem between him and his friends. Combining that with this horrid feeling of instability in their friendship, of distance growing wider and wider...

"I still have to do _something_ ," she said, feeling desperation rise like a tidal wave. "I _have_ to. Severus, he's... he's not like those other boys, Remus, I know he's not."

"But he's becoming."

"Yes, and I just... I can't just not fight for him, don't you see? He's been my best friend for seven years, my, my first true friend, how can I just..."

But it suddenly felt like such a dauntingly hopeless task, because all of their debates and arguments about those Slytherins and Dark Magic and You-Know-Who went through her mind, and she could see how, with each one that she instigated, he was closing off to her more and more, and she was _tired_ of it, tired of the feeling that she was banging her head against the wall, tired of trying to make him _see_ and failing, or even worse, not even understanding even the basics any longer, like he'd told her just now, tired of this ridiculous dance they were doing, of starting arguments and backing off without resolving them, until she didn't even dare to fight like they used to, tired of straining herself to see the good that she knew was in him, the light that was being eaten away by the darkness of bloodism and the Dark Arts and Slytherin cruelty.

"I get it," Remus answered, moving his hand up between them, letting it hover on the edges of her vision in hesitation before finally placing it on Lily's shoulder. A comforting touch. Merlin, but she was grateful for having found a friend in this kind boy before her. "What you said in the hospital wing, I heard you, even if James and Sirius didn't. But can you get past their hatred of him and try to think about what they said, too? James means well, and I think there's truth in his words, too. It's about actions and choices, as much as circumstance. I had to choose to be friends with James and Sirius, back in first year, when they were trying be my friends. And in our second year, when they confronted me about my monthly outings to the Shrieking Shack, I had to choose to trust them with it. It was... it went against everything I ever knew, you see, and I had to make a choice. And, whatever else, I think you need Snape to make a choice, too, in this, otherwise you'll run yourself ragged not accomplishing anything."

Lily blinked tears out of her eyes as she let Remus' words settle in her mind. She didn't feel stable enough to think on them now, not when the whole day had been one big roller coaster ride. But Remus' words held such earnestness to them, such caring sincerity, that she couldn't dismiss them the way she'd been able to dismiss that fight with Potter and Black from a couple of weeks ago.

So she just nodded and took a deep breath, expelling it slowly, and all her doubts and thoughts on this with it. She wanted to spend the day with Remus, exploring the castle and figuring out why he'd want to make a map of the school, and thoughts on Severus were too weighted to let her do this in any sort of positive spirit. They could wait; for once, she could put something of her own first, because Severus had been doing that with their friendship for years, and so why shouldn't she, as well?

Remus, apparently satisfied that she'd at least heard him, removed his hand, his palm leaving a trace of warmth on her shoulder, for a moment still looking at her.

Then his stomach growled quite noisily, and the sound, so loud in the silence of the deserted section, broke the heaviness of the moment far more effectively than anything else could have, leaving Lily to giggle and Remus to smile abashedly.

"Maybe we should head for lunch?" she suggested, and they headed back the way they'd come.

It took them about fifteen minutes to figure out that they were a little bit lost, which, really, thinking about it, should have been absurd, what with the map Remus had been drawing. Yet by the time it dawned on them that something wasn't quite right, they were in a completely unfamiliar corridor.

"How's this possible?" she murmured to herself, peering into the sketch Remus had made. "We followed the way back, didn't we?"

"I suppose that's why this part of the school is closed down," he said thoughtfully. "Either the castle is changing, or there's some sort of spell designed to confuse us."

"So how do we get out, then?" she asked, feeling a little nervous. There were paintings here, but not of people, so they could hardly ask them for a guide back. Remus, though, only narrowed his eyes in thought, before motioning with his head.

"Come on; let's see if we can find a window."

In the end, they needed to search five rooms before they ran into an outer wall, and on a completely different side than where it had been before. Really, the whole thing was completely confusing.

"All right," Remus said, peering down; they were on the fourth floor, looking down on a small courtyard. "I can climb down a floor and try to levitate you down."

"And, what, do it until we get all the way to the ground? The whole section of the castle is forbidden, so it must all be affected.

"It's either that or try to find our way back. I'm not bad at climbing – apparently, comes with my affliction."

"I can climb, too," Lily informed him, peering down. "There's a tree near my window, in our back yard, that Sev and I use to sneak into and out of my room."

"Who's not being goody two-shoes now?" he asked, and she smiled at him, a little smugly.

"I have my own tricks. Hm, perhaps if we levitated one another floor by floor?"

"Can you hold the spell that long?"

"A charm? Always."

In the end, it was a combination of both; Remus clambered down while Lily eased his way by levitating his mass so that the gravity wasn't pulling on him so much, and then he did the same for her. It took a while, since they had to work floor by floor, and by the end of it, her hands were completely scraped and her arms and legs hurt terribly from the strain, but they were down and quickly on their way to more familiar ground.

Still, the whole experience, as fun as it had been, did remind Lily of her childhood game of swing-jumping, and her breath almost caught in her throat as the idea fully formed in her mind.

"I know what I'm going to do for my Charms Mastery," she said, a little breathlessly, as they neared the Great Hall.

"Really? What?"

"I'm going to invent a spell to fly."

* * *

Tired but satisfied, Remus trudged up to the fifth-year boys' dormitory that Sunday evening with the foremost thought of getting some sleep. His mind was a little fuzzy around the edges, and his eyelids felt heavy enough he was struggling to keep them open, just a bit.

He'd planned to study with the boys for the rest of the day, but the unexpected discovery in the forbidden section of the castle teased at his consciousness until he'd just given up on Arithmancy and instead tried to figure out how much of his map was actually accurate, what sort of magic could create spatial confusion, whether it _was_ spatial confusion that was the issue at all or if it was that the castle was physically changing in that section, and how he could incorporate all of that into the Map.

The Marauder's Map, their most prized possession, was a work of ingenuity, and even Remus' usually humble thoughts wouldn't let him push down the pride at having created it. The boys helped tremendously, of course – plotting the whole castle was an arduous task, made far easier when four people were wiling away at it instead of one, and even after sections were assembled to everyone's satisfaction (as much as possible; there were still parts that promised hidden passageways and secret rooms to be discovered), there was still the task of casting the spells that would connect the Map to Hogwarts and vice versa.

Really, in certain awe-struck moments, Remus still couldn't quite figure out how he'd managed to pull it off. Charming the Map was relatively simple, of course, but all the charms in the world were essentially useless without some sort of monitoring system that would actually transmit the information to the Map. And that had meant that they'd had to find a way of placing permanent monitoring magic on pretty much all of Hogwarts.

To say that it was a feat that was an instinctive impossibility would have been understating it by a few magnitudes.

And yet, Remus had come up with a solution nonetheless, one based in a knowledge that had crept up on him and become part of his perception of his beloved school long before he'd become aware of it consciously.

Hogwarts – the castle, not the institution – was almost a living thing.

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was about ten centuries old, all told. The castle itself was suspected of being a couple hundred years older still, and belonging to a wizarding family for most of that time. This meant that magic had been performed in it for at least twelve hundred years, progressively more complex and powerful magic as well as the simpler spells, with each successive generation adding to its protections more and more.

This level of magical activity always created a fulcrum for magical energy; the almost incomprehensible weave of interlocking spells, signatures and powers formed the tapestry of all magical places that not many saw, but all felt. And Remus couldn't say that he was surprised that so much magic, so tightly bound to extremely powerful witches and wizards leading Britain's and West Europe's foremost wizarding school, fed by thousands and thousands of children who lived within its stones, could create a sort of sentience for itself. Whether the Founders had planted that seed or not, whether someone had willingly breathed spirit into the castle, or if it had simply grown out of the almost primordial soup of magic, but the castle herself (because Remus remembered how all Muggle objects with given names were female, be they cars or planes or boats, so it seemed fitting in his head) was as much her own individual as any living and unliving soul within her walls.

Remus was the only one of his friends who'd grasped this, who even had the ability to sense this sentience, undefined as it was. He had attempted to convince himself, once or twice, that it was because he was in some way magically special, but he wasn't one for false claims. The truth, he suspected, rested far more on the fact that he was a Dark creature, his magical core forever tainted with some of the most powerful Dark Magic in existence. And Hogwarts felt it.

It was this connection – and his years-long attempts at finding some way of communicating with it, especially when the full moon neared, when Hogwarts became more displeased (and even a little bit hostile) towards him – that had facilitated the circumstances he suspected were necessary for him to place the monitoring charms for the Map to work. Above all, Hogwarts needed to accept this new thread into her magical weave, accept it to the point where it became a part of the tapestry, because that was the only way in which the Map would not lose its abilities over time.

He'd succeeded; finding the proper monitoring magic had been a chore, but the Hogwarts library had held what he'd needed, and whether she'd understood why he wished to cast these spells or because she knew him to be giving his best to not be just the wolf that dwelled within him, Hogwarts had cooperated with him on it, until the spellwork that had gone into the Marauder's Map had been as solid as the stone beneath his feet. Arduous labour of almost two years now, but well worth it, considering.

Now it was just a matter of actually completing all the parts of the Map, and that included days like today, that left him feeling as if a lorry had rolled right over him.

He almost dropped himself onto his bed without noticing James lounging on his, playing with his Snitch. In the last moment, he startled a little at the sight, but in the end was too tired to do much more than throw out a weak 'hello'.

"Where've you been?" James asked with nothing but genuine curiosity in his voice. Sirius was the one who was more likely to be jealous of time not spent in their group, Remus had learned in the past two months of his increasing association with Lily; James and Peter didn't seem nearly as threatened by the prospect of having outside friends. In a way, Remus did understand. Sirius' home life was such that he had to fight for everything he could call his own, and that included the people he wished to keep in his life, especially the three of them, who were the last people his parents wanted him associated with. A certain amount of possessiveness was something almost expected of him. Still, it was nice to hear genuine curiosity about his activities that did not have ties to anything more personal to the questioner.

"Spent the morning mapping the closed section with Lily," he answered, dropping his arm over his eyes to shut away the flickering lights of the candles. "Hogwarts got us turned around, so we had to climb down the outer wall to the ground from the fourth floor. Spent the afternoon trying to figure out what sort of magic could get us so lost and if my mapping was useless for it."

"And?"

"Dunno yet."

"Listen – could you, maybe, put in a good word for me with Lily?"

"Huh?"

"She's still pissed at me for that argument at the hospital wing, I think, won't even look at me without glaring now. But she's obviously comfortable with you, so I thought..."

Remus groaned, dropping his cheek to the pillow to look at his friend.

"Must you?"

"Must I what?"

He seemed genuinely confused, which made the whole thing even worse.

"Must you ask me to play messenger between you two? She'll just hate me for it, and you will not have gotten anything."

"Look, I know Lily's stubborn, all right, but I'm sure she'd not _hate_ you if you just dropped a good w–"

"Prongs," Remus interrupted him, hating the position the other boy was putting him in and too tired to find the right words that would ensure James would not be angry with him for refusing – but he didn't feel right agreeing to this, not when he understood why Lily was upset with James and when her friendship was quickly growing to be as important to Remus as the friendship between the Marauders. "Apologise to her, and I'm sure she'll stop glaring at you."

"I tried, but she wouldn't hear me."

"Tried what?"

"To apologise to her for yelling at her," James clarified. "It only seemed to make her angrier."

Remus did truly love his friends deeply, but by Merlin, they could be dumb.

"I meant apologise to her for not listening to her arguments."

"I _did_ ," James pointed out, a little testily, "and then I refuted them. It's not my fault if she gets upset for not being right."

Growling in annoyance, Remus dug under his pillow for his pyjama, deciding that if James wanted to be such a dumb-arse, Remus wasn't obligated to help him. Especially not when all he wanted to was to drop into bed and never wake up.

"Moony?"

"Ask me tomorrow," he only said, getting to his feet to get to the bathroom. No matter how annoying, Remus knew that he was too tired now to properly think, and that included reasoning with James about something the mussy-haired boy was this certain about.

And, as he fell asleep that night, Remus couldn't stop the pang of resentment that, instead of listening to his advice, James wanted Remus to fix his problems with Lily, at the expense of his friendship with the red-haired girl, and even more that James had seemingly not even noticed the way in which he was putting Remus in an uncomfortable position.

(But then, James, for all his attentiveness towards his friends, was surprisingly blind not only to other people's feelings, but also to the ways in which his actions impacted others, and it was something Remus should have kept reminding himself of since the first time he'd realised it.)

* * *

The beginning of May slipped by Severus among hectic preparations for O.W.L.s, sneaking about and balancing friendships, and continued lessons with Dumbledore, leaving June to creep ever closer with very little fanfare. In a way, life settled down a little, and Severus didn't know whether to be grateful for it or not, because he didn't feel comfortable – he was still not able to produce a corporeal Patronus, though he'd at least begun consistently producing the incorporeal form, and more and more, he'd begun telling the Headmaster about things that caused him inner turmoil, mostly his fears of losing Lily, the stress of sneaking about, the frustration with Potter and his gang, and even a little bit about his home life.

Dumbledore was a figure that had always inspired fear and resentment, but also a fair bit of awe. As it had become normal to spend evenings with him – two or three a week normally, but sometimes the Headmaster insisted on seeing him even more often, which Severus resisted to an extent but ultimately most often acquiesced to – the sixteen-year-old had found himself relaxing more and more around the man. Most of the time, Dumbledore was his usual twinkly-eyed, lemon-sweets-offering grandfatherly self, something the Slytherin knew to be mostly a mask, yet was still unable to resist completely. However, there were moments when Severus felt as if he was hanging on by a thread, when he couldn't think straight from impotent rage or when he felt so afraid that he couldn't breathe, and in these moments Dumbledore stopped being that benign-looking figure and became a powerful guide, someone who always, _always_ seemed to know the right words to lead Severus out of his own twisted thoughts, who made him stop and breathe and work through his anger or fear or whatever else was choking him at that moment. For all of the Slytherin's apprehensions, it was as if that evening after his fight with Lily had broken some sort of barrier he'd had in his mind, and what had poured out was a willingness – and perhaps even sometimes an urge – to share his problems with the Headmaster, to come to him when things became too much, simply to be able to exist normally again.

In spite of it all, he didn't actually _want_ to trust Dumbledore, and for the most part, he managed to hold on to his mistrust in regard to what was most important, at least – his dilemma about the Dark Lord. He knew what Dumbledore wanted of him, of course; with each new invention he shared with the old wizard, Severus became more certain that Dumbledore's intentions for him were less than pure. The Dark Lord was, slowly but surely, growing from a mild threat into a sinister darkness on the horizon, an extreme Pure-blood-oriented figure that attracted all those with inclination towards the Dark Arts, someone who had the rhetorical abilities on par with Gellert Grindelwald's and Adolf Hilter's, and the inclination towards extremism to match. Considering this, the more Severus got to know Albus Dumbledore, the more it became obvious to him that the war (the true war, that was, not this fighting-in-the-shadows situation that was currently being called a war) between the two was inevitable. And like any war general, like the Dark Lord himself, Dumbledore was collecting people for that struggle. It would have been foolish to think that he wasn't trying to recruit Severus to his side, and indeed, the Slytherin had known that from the start.

This was why he made sure to keep mum on that one most important thing; Dumbledore had given him leeway in this regard, and while he no doubt thought that he could use the time Severus needed to decide to recruit him, Severus himself needed the time to prove to himself that he wasn't a lost cause from the start. The balancing act was, perhaps, not one of Severus' smartest ideas, but with the way he'd lost his ability to focus and push things to the side – what Dumbledore referred to as his inborn Occlumency affinity – there was little else he could do.

And, in a way, it flattered, that Dumbledore saw something worth recruiting in him, too. Every time he managed to impress such a powerful wizard in some way or other, Severus felt smug satisfaction that lifted his spirits, along with a distant sense of childish joy that he firmly ignored, the one he'd felt only a few times in his life, back when his mother cared about such things as his achievements and emotional well-being, of making one's parent proud. It was this feeling that, more and more, caused him distress, because where he'd been certain of his path before his initial talk with Dumbledore, and had mostly found ways of keeping hold of that vision in the very beginning of their sessions, with each honest praise and pride that Dumbledore showed in his spells and potions, with each true advice and guidance that the old wizard offered, Severus felt more and more torn from that initial goal, more and more reminded of what Dumbledore had told him of the Dark Lord and his methods, more and more certain that whatever little truth there was in Dumbledore's reactions to Severus' innovations, it was miles more than he'd _ever_ get from Voldemort.

Lily didn't help in this. He knew that he couldn't tell her about any of it until he'd made his decision, but a part of him had hoped that their relationship would be one of the things that would guide him to a choice on the matter. More often than not these days, it was looking doubtful that such a thing would happen. They argued more than ever, yet not any sort of true fights – now they both faltered half-way and conceded without reaching any true resolution, and with each such event that transpired, Severus felt his desperation rise, because there was a sense of helplessness that was growing between those concessions, a sense of loss that he didn't know how to quell, and, for the first time in his life, it was obvious to him that Lily didn't, either. He still spent time with his dormmates and the older Slytherins, though he was less engaged than he'd been before, becoming a little more uncomfortable with their actions every day as Dumbledore's words rang louder and louder in his mind, reminding him that Lily didn't want preferential treatment, that she'd not like being singled out in any way, that she'd not condone the sort of bloodism Severus found himself still believing in.

Potter continued trying to insinuate himself in Lily's life, and at least in that one thing, she remained stubbornly consistent, to Severus' relief and satisfaction – she had become more critical of him, and had not hesitated in letting him and his cronies know. Except for the fact that she seemed to have become closer to Lupin of all people, she shunned the group as effectively as she could shun Severus when she was angry with him. While that seemed to have made Potter more determined than ever, Severus found comfort in it, nonetheless, because Lily wasn't by nature someone who changed her mind easily, and so long as nothing drastic happened, it seemed to him that he'd bought himself a little time. The only thing he didn't know was how much of it, exactly.

He wasn't too keen on figuring that out, either.

* * *

"Why the Half-Blood Prince?"

It felt like someone had hit him with the Full Body-Binding Curse, as Severus met Dumbledore's eyes; even his lungs refused to expand and contract for so long he thought he might suffocate from lack of oxygen.

Then the momentary shock passed, and he could breathe again, though only shallow breaths that fed his panic.

He'd never wanted the old wizard to know about that, had been _so_ careful. So how? How had he found out? How?

"There is no need to panic," Dumbledore said mildly. "I do not judge; I am simply curious as to the origin of the name."

"I... I... how?"

"How do I know of it?" Dumbledore shrugged, a small smile appearing on his face. "I trust you've heard of the Muggle expression 'a magician never reveals his secrets'?"

Narrowing his eyes, Severus glared at the man. "That's only said by bad magicians."

"Hm. Perhaps. Let us say, then, that one should be careful where one doodles significant things."

Fuck, where had he slipped up? Where?

"Severus, why does it upset you that I know of the name?"

He stayed stubbornly silent, refusing to release a word.

"Is it because you feel that I might see the similarities between you and Tom Riddle in this choice of a pretentious nickname?"

"It's not pretentious," escaped him before he could stop it.

"Ah, yes, I'd nearly forgotten," Dumbledore agreed in a murmur. "Your mother's maiden name is Prince. Do you wish that you were a Prince, as well?"

"I _am_ a Prince."

"By blood. Not by name. Names, Mr Snape, have power. All names, and especially self-chosen names. Is it because of your father?"

"I'd rather not talk about this," Severus said, resenting how efficiently the Headmaster was reminding him of his actual last name.

"You've mentioned your mother several times to me, but you have been very vague as to your father's position in your life. I would like to know a little more about him."

"Why?" Severus bit out, clenching his hands by his sides. "Why is this so sodding important to you all of a sudden?"

"Because it is important to you," Dumbledore answered. "You have been meeting with me for two months now, and while you certainly have the magical capabilities to cast a corporeal Patronus, you have not managed to do so. Tell me, what is the earliest happy memory that you possess?"

Sighing, because this supposed change of subject was no doubt going to lead back to the issue with Severus' father, he nonetheless clutched at it like a drowning man. He knew that his only options were to answer the old man in as few words as would be needed to satisfy him, or to huff out and be faced with the same question their next session, by which time he'd be even more frustrated because he'd have spent days expecting it. But if he could have a few minutes of respite, to at least try and figure out how little he could get away with saying, then he was going to hold onto it with both hands.

So, he turned his mind back to his earliest childhood, trying to remember something that might qualify as a happy memory. There were moments, of course; he knew all of them, from his fourth birthday and the brewing lesson his mother gave him as a present, to that time his father took him to Manchester for a football game, to his first visit to Diagon Alley when he was almost five. But all those were mired in bitterness and anger – the fact that his mother had magically hidden the basement where she'd taught him to brew, the fact that his father had always been so disappointed at Severus' disinterest for sports of any kind, the fact that even back then, there'd not been enough money for Eileen to buy anything Severus had wanted, not even on his very first trip to the wizarding world.

What happiness he'd experienced as a child had never been any sort of happiness he could hold on to, just fleeting moments shadowed by the whaling size of the misery his home life was, and he knew that none of those were even close enough to produce a Patronus. The only memories that let him produce even that wispy mist of an incorporeal Patronus were all tied to Lily, in one way or another.

Defeated, he shook his head.

"Severus," Dumbledore said gently, suddenly very close to the teen, "happiness is what helps us face each day. It is what protects us from misery and the feeling of pointlessness, what drives us. That is why such a little charm as the Patronus is so powerful against Dementors. But for those to whom that happiness is not naturally given, it can be easy to forget that it exists. Every speck of happiness is precious, even those that have been tarred in negativity. Tell me the first happy memory you remember, no matter how fleeting that happiness was."

"Mother teaching me how to brew, for my fourth birthday," came out, even as his mouth twisted in a grimace. "She'd kept a Muggle-Repelling Charm on the door to the basement, so that my father wouldn't find out that was how she earned Galleons on the side."

"How long did she keep it secret?"

"Until he saw my accidental magic and she had to tell him about being a witch," he spat out bitterly, resenting his mother for keeping something so very vital away from the man, resenting his father for seeing them both as dirty and foreign for being magical, resenting himself for not being able to hide it properly, for ruining what had, until then, been at least a little bit of a good life.

"So, you've inherited your love for potions from your mother?"

Severus released a sharp bark of laughter and shook his head. "Mother hates potion-making. It just happens to be something she can pass off as cooking, and that pays enough that she doesn't have to depend on _him_ for money." His bark turned to a soft whimper as the thought struck him. "The one magical thing she shared with me, and she hates it as much as I love it."

"Or, perhaps you love it _because_ it is the one magical thing she shared with you, even though she hated it? If it was the only magic she allowed herself, then it was the only way she could show you the part of yourself you value the most. Even if it was through something that she liked the least."

Severus' contrary arguments died in his throat as the words swirled in his mind and wrapped themselves around that memory, around the bitterness that had ever been tied to it, deeper even than the fact she'd hidden their magic from his father for so many years, the bitterness that had its roots in the divide that had grown ever wider between them over the years, that he suddenly knew had started so early he didn't even remember it.

But Dumbledore's words, Dumbledore's interpretation of the one little thing, this one little insignificant thing that meant so much to him, it was beautifully brilliant now in his mind, like Lily's smiling face after a horrid day, like successfully improving a potion, like pride in Dumbledore's eyes after seeing another of Severus' new inventions.

And suddenly, thinking of that age-old memory, of his pudgy little fingers carefully dropping one, two, three, four Sopophorous beans into the cauldron while his mother stood by his side, holding him steady on the bench, her black hair in that skull-pulling bun and her black eyes as unfathomable as they'd always been, and her face the dearest thing to his heart, he felt the child's elation at making _magic_ , at his mum _teaching_ him magic, at this secret between them that was just their own, that was bigger than anything he'd ever gotten in his life, elation as he'd not thought existed.

For one brilliant, breath-taking moment, Severus felt utterly, and purely... happy.

Letting the memory go with urgent need and great reluctance, Severus found that he'd closed his eyes. But when he opened them, the world was blurry and stinging, making him blink and sink into the horror of having his tears witnessed by _Albus Dumbledore_ of all people, the man he feared and admired in equal measure, the man he trusted and distrusted in turns, the man he'd found himself wishing to impress more and more with each passing day.

He wiped at his cheeks hastily with the sleeves of his robes and cleared his throat, lowering his head down to let his hair hide him from view. The whole thing had shaken him far more than he'd ever imagined.

"Severus," Dumbledore said, placing his hand on Severus' shoulder, an action that still made uncomfortable tingling shoot up his spine, "do not shy away from such a thing as happiness. For your own sake, do not allow yourself to lose grasp of it, no matter what else may wish to interfere. It is a hard thing to learn how to allow both the good and the bad of a memory to coexist without affecting one other, but it is one of the most rewarding things that you will ever accomplish, and it is, in the end, what truly matters, because without it, there will never be a memory happy enough to hold you through the darkest of days."

"I don't know how," Severus admitted, voice rough and choked. "I don't know how to do this..."

"I will guide you and teach you," Dumbledore promised. "Sometimes, we all need a little help; do not resent yourself for needing it, my boy."

How could he not, when all that need had ever brought him were tears and heartache? But that brilliant childhood joy... Merlin, he wanted it, desperately, enviously, greedily, he wanted it, the way he'd wanted it as a child constantly, the way his father had been able to hurt him so badly, the way his mother had been able to disappoint him so horribly.

He'd forgotten, Severus realised. To protect himself, he'd forgotten what it had felt like, to simply be happy, the way only a little child might, wholly and fully, in a moment, without before and after to muddy the way. He'd made himself tar everything in his bitterness and hatred, cloaked it all in his anger and pride, until there was nothing left of him exposed enough to be hurt the way his five-year-old self had been hurt.

Except Lily.

How could that witch always be the exception to everything, he didn't know, but she was, and even with all the distance building between them, with the terrible, terrible fear that he was ever closer to losing her, there was nothing his heart and soul could do to protect themselves from her, nothing at all to tar her in his mind. Not his circumstances, not her actions, not even the fact that she wasn't whom he'd thought her to be all these years – nothing could stick to that part of him that clutched her tightly, so tightly, to his very being.

He felt adrift again, trapped in the roaring waters of the stormy sea, unable to find purchase, to know up from down, and only one moor left to him in it, this one spell that had become his purpose in the last two months, that was the one clear goal he couldn't take his eyes off of, not even for a second.

He would produce a corporeal Patronus, even if it killed him.

Even if it meant having to make himself as exposed as he'd once been, even if it meant getting as hurt as he'd once been. Once burned, twice shy, and no truer words for Severus, but he was going to do it, by Merlin, he was going to produce his guardian to shine the light into his self-made darkness, the darkness spun from circumstance and pain and fear; that part of him that he couldn't tar, that part of him that held on to Lily with desperate strength, it demanded it ferociously, because it was losing its grip, slipping away, too, and no matter how much Severus felt comfortable in the darkness, the truth was that he'd never seen it absolute, never seen it complete.

And that darkness terrified him to his core.

Needing help, even from Albus Dumbledore, seemed so completely insignificant by comparison, that he barely even hesitated to fully reach out to an adult, _this_ adult across from him, for the first time in his life.

"All right."


	8. Ch I,7: The Budding of Change

**Chapter 7: The Budding of Change**

 _Dear Tuney,_

 _How are you? I am so sorry that I've not written to you in... Merlin, it's been months, hasn't it? School is complete chaos currently; we have our big exams, I think they compare to your O-levels. Ours are called O.W.L.s, the Ordinary Wizarding Levels, and I have to pass most of them with 'Exceeds Expectations' or even 'Outstanding's in order to take upper levels. I am still undecided about what I wish to pursue after Hogwarts, but it is better to have passed more than necessary, than to be missing some when I do decide. How is your prep for A-levels coming? Have you decided if you'll go to uni afterwards?_

 _Do you ever miss the time when we were little? When we'd play in the park and I'd make the flowers dance in my hand? I've found myself thinking about it recently. Remember the sight of Severus, that first day he'd called me a witch? He was so much easier to understand, back then. But then, I think everything was. The world is a far more confusing place than I'd ever noticed, Tuney. It's a little frightening, really, to understand that, but I think it's important._

 _Could you find me a book or two on social movements? Perhaps a historical one, on the suffragette movement or the civil rights struggle in America? Whichever you think might be interesting. I know it is not your cup of tea, but I feel like I need to understand it all better. There is a radical political group, here in the wizarding world, that believes in what they call 'blood purity'. They think that magic should be something that belongs only to those from magical families, and that people like me, Muggle-borns, should be second-class citizens at best. Their leader declared war on what he calls 'Muggle-favouritism'. Almost six years ago now, if you can believe it; it doesn't seem to be a true war, to me at least, not nearly the way Dad had described the Second World War, but I've become fearful of just how many people seem to believe in his rhetoric. Even Severus – he claims that my Muggle heritage doesn't matter, but to hear him speak of it sometimes... but I still try to hold on to my hope that he will see sense._

 _I know this doesn't much interest you, Tuney; I know you hate my world. But I still wish to hear what you think of all this, if you think I could make a difference if only I found a way of fighting the prejudice and bigotry, of bringing about equality between Pure-bloods and Muggle-borns. It's far too ambitious, really, especially when I'm in the middle of preparing for my O.W.L.s and it hits me that I have so much to learn still, but every time I read the_ Daily Prophet _, and they report on another Muggle-born being targeted in some way, I get filled with this horrid, impotent anger at the injustice of it. What have we ever done to those people, that they would forbid us from exercising the magical skills we've been born to? That they would isolate us and forbid us from holding governmental positions, or marrying whom we choose? To hear them speak, they would like to chuck us all in some distant corner of the country and forget that we even exist._

 _And this slur they use for us. Mudblood. It's such a silly word, really, in itself. It reminds me of 'Golliwog', just something put together to sound catchy – it even has the inner consonance, see? Blood cannot hold anything resembling mud or dirt, but I swear some of them truly think that if they cut us, we'd bleed brown. I know slurs can be such innocuous words – 'queer' used to mean 'not feeling well', and 'poof' is just a sound, really, yet they carry with them so much disgust in this day and age – but it is hard to view them only as such after they have been used to degrade. I suppose the association behind them, the sentiment it brings up, is what truly makes them what they are, like Golliwog was a rag doll in that storybook we found once in the library, and today, 'wog' is such a horrid ethnic and racial slur. Mudblood, for all that it might not be a logical word, is one I cannot but hate. For those radicals, the purity of their blood is everything; they believe that our blood is what holds our magical cores, and so to have muddy blood means that your very magic – the core of you – is tainted and dirty. That our souls are dirtier than theirs, when they are the ones who feel no compunction about hurting and harming others. And every time I hear that word used mindlessly, the way they always throw it around, when I hear it targeted at me or my friends, I want to scream._

 _I didn't mean to write all this to you; I'm sure you'd have liked a more cheerful letter after so long – and I really am very sorry for not writing to you for so long. I do miss you, no matter what you may think, and I hope that you miss me, too. Please write a few sentences to me, and if you're that uncomfortable with owl post, leave it to Mum, and she can send it to me with her next letter. And thank you in advance for the books._

 _Love,_

 _Your sister, Lily_

* * *

When the next new moon rolled around (on Thursday evening this time), Lily waited to make certain that Potter, Black and Pettigrew had stumbled into the Great Hall for dinner before she snuck out of the grand room and hurried to the hospital wing. She'd known the three boys would have been back any chance they could have gotten between the day's classes, and she didn't fancy running into them, considering what had ended up happening last month. At the same time, she remembered what they'd told her about Remus sleeping the transformation off for most of the day, and she'd wanted to catch him awake, rather than asleep.

For this reason, it was almost half six by the time she finally sat down by his bed, offering a congenial smile to her friend, who was eating his own dinner at the moment, sitting propped up with several pillows.

"I'll be released tomorrow," he explained. He looked wan to Lily's eyes, though the bags under his eyes weren't as bad as they'd been two days ago. "Though I think Madam Pomfrey will keep me until the afternoon this time."

"What makes it different from the last time?"

"When the moon turns full. Last time, it happened in the middle of the day; this time was at the beginning of the evening. Those are always harder."

"So even that makes a difference?"

Remus nodded with distinct lack of enthusiasm.

"The hardest ones are the ones when the moon turns full right before dawn. Then I have two days of looking forward to it. Not full days, of course, but even for a few hours, it's... hard."

Lily barely contained her gasp. She'd never really given any thought to the mechanics behind the Lycanthropy Curse; why it would work in this way – why it was only triggered the moment of absolute lunar brightness, and why its effects were so powerful for the following twenty-four hours; why the hours leading up to it didn't count (though thank Merlin they didn't, because then it could have extended to full three days, and she could barely imagine what it felt like to have to cope with one per month), or whether cloud cover made a difference – this was not explored in any literature she'd read, least of all their DADA textbook.

"Oh, Remus, I'm so sorry."

In answer, her sandy-haired friend shrugged.

"Nothing you can do about it. It's all right."

It wasn't, but Lily for once decided to keep her mouth shut on that. No doubt Remus already knew it wasn't all right, and if he needed to keep this façade up, then she wasn't going to take it away from him.

"Do you... remember, what you do during the night?"

Remus' answer was a very exhausted shrug. "Not really. Flashes, a few minutes here and there. More as I get older, I suppose. Apparently, the memories start getting far clearer after puberty, at least from what I've read. But it's... it's terrifying, really. I have absolutely no control, I'm not... rational, I suppose. There's no _me_ in those memories, no thought process or decision that's even remotely human. It's all sensations and sounds and hunger and urge for... for human flesh. The curse wanting to infect others. The wolf is the curse, see, and there's nothing I can do to stop it."

Swallowing dryly, Lily cast for another topic of conversation, feeling chills from the way Remus' voice turned melancholy and pained. The first thing that came to her was their Charms Class he'd missed, so she talked with him about the day's lessons and explained the homework they had been assigned to distract them both. From there, their conversation segued into their plans for the summer, and Lily got to learn another thing about Remus – he loved watching Muggle films in the theatre.

"We had to move very often," he explained when she asked why, "because of the wolf. When I was little, it was easy enough to contain it, but after I was about five or six... even Muggles tended to notice in spite of everything my father did to keep the secret. I never had any friends. It was always just Ma, Dad and me. They home-schooled me until Hogwarts, and Dad's the one who's magical, so he taught me all about the Wizarding world. Mum sometimes felt... excluded, I think. She adores magic, but... so, films are our thing. Whenever I felt down, she'd take me to the theatre, and we'd buy popcorn and sit in the back row for hours, watching one projection after another."

"Magic that's magic for the both of you," Lily realised.

"Yeah. She tries to make sure I don't lose contact with the Muggle world, and... I'm very grateful to her for it. Even if it's just through history or art. Can you believe that Mum _actually_ went with me to see _The Rocky Horror Picture Show_?"

Staring at him, Lily frowned as the name rang out familiarly in her mind.

"Wait, isn't that the film with, what's his name, in fishnets?"

Remus grinned. "Tim Curry."

"You saw that with _your mum_?"

"Not my idea," he admitted. "I thought it'd be humiliating, honestly, but it was her birthday, and she wanted to see it. She loved it, actually, and we had a lot of fun."

"Wow. I think my mum's head would have exploded if she'd even heard of it, let alone seen it," Lily said with an impressed smile. "I wanted to see it, but there was no theatre showing it anywhere near our town, and I'm not even sure if it played in Manchester at all, so..." she ended the sentence with a shrug.

Remus launched into a brief summary of the story, even humming the one famous song from it, seemingly completely distracted from the fact that he was in the hospital wing and in pain from the transformation, and though she continued keeping most of her mind on their conversation, Lily did still find herself occupied by the thought that where Remus seemed still very much in touch with his Muggle side, she herself – a Muggle-born! – was pulling away from it. When had she last gone to see a film? She couldn't even remember reading any fashion magazines that weren't witches-oriented, and all her Muggle clothes were by now quite uncomfortably tight in the bust area. And her old friends from primary? Merlin, she'd not spoken to any of them in at least two years.

It left a sour taste in her mouth, especially in light of her new resolution to fight for the rights of Muggle-borns; after all, the Muggle world was her heritage, wasn't it? Yet, thinking about why this was so, it became obvious it wasn't just her who was losing the connection to that world – it was the case for many of her fellow Muggle-born witches and wizards as well. The thought was a little depressing, really, because the world was so much bigger than just Wizarding Britain, and yet somehow she'd completely forgotten her dreams of seeing it all one day.

Her thoughts circled around this point in the following days, largely without her permission, and mostly because she had no exhaust for them. There wasn't much she could do to familiarise herself with Muggle popular culture or political hot topics (was Harold Wilson still the Prime Minister? What was going on with the Cold War? And, come to think of it, were its effects visible in Wizarding Russia, too? Just how separate _were_ the other Wizarding countries from their Muggle counterparts?) right now, nor did she have time for it, not with everything else she was juggling.

Her attempts to put the issue aside until the summer hols resulted in her mind wandering to a different train of thought – namely, Remus' words to her from that day they'd gotten lost in the east section, about that fight she'd had last month with Potter and Black, and about Severus becoming like those other Slytherins.

She'd told herself she'd not listen to a word Potter and Black had said, and she didn't _want_ to, but her anger had cooled over the last month, and now that it wasn't smoking up her vision, their points, helped by Remus' earnest plea to actually hear them, were coming back, and damn them to seven hells, but they wouldn't leave her be.

Severus was a good person, deep down; it was something Lily had concluded with all of her nine-year-old faculties, a belief, a faith, perhaps, that had managed to endure even the worst of their fights over the last two years. Mayhap she needed to believe it as much as she wished to; the truth was that she wasn't blind to the way Severus found hurtful actions dismissive when they came from his friends, and if she were to not believe him a good person, then all that would have been left to be done would have been to stop being friends with him.

But, as he'd pointed out, that had been the same thing she'd been doing, about Potter and Black, so how could she ever stand by that reasoning without being a hypocrite? Maybe that was why she was finding it easier and easier to remain perpetually angry with Remus' friends – if she always searched for the ways in which they were the same as Severus' friends, then she could shield herself from a very good reason to break off with her childhood friend.

She was tired, though; two weeks hadn't changed that in the least. And, now that she was considering it, it had become clear quite quickly that this weariness was an old companion, one she'd begun to carry around almost two years ago, and that seemed to cover most of her interactions with Severus like a blanket. A very heavy, stifling blanket, woven out of Severus' casual disregard for the pain of others, out of his dismissal of all her complaints about the other Slytherins, out of the disgust and fear that the word 'Mudblood', spoken by the people he considered friends, passed un-noted by him. It was as if there was a glass wall thickening between them, and the more she screamed and pounded her fists on it, the less her words and pleas and shouts penetrated to him.

She thought she knew at least part of the reason why Severus seemed so drawn to anti-Muggle factions. They'd never spoken of it, of course, not ever, but she still vividly remembered – had nightmares, sometimes, of it – that one night, two years ago, when he'd thrown rocks at her window because he'd been unable to climb up the tree to get into her room, when she'd gone down to meet him and found him with a horridly broken, bloody nose, a black eye, and nasty, nasty bruises up and down his ribs. The only thing he'd told her about it had been that his father had tried to kick him out of the house, and he hadn't known where else to go. And he'd looked so utterly humiliated for having to come to her, so stubbornly clinging to his tattered pride, from the moment she'd climbed down the tree to the moment when they'd snuck to the back door of his house, within the bounds of the magic that denominated the dilapidated little thing on Spinner's End as a wizarding dwelling but still outside the house proper, so that she could perform her first and last illegal act of magic and use _Episky_ to fix his nose, having to be quiet as church mice, lest his father catch them doing their freaky thing. His mother had put her foot down and he'd been able to return home the next day, but so far as Lily knew, she'd never done a thing to stop this from happening again.

And really, Lily thought that, if she had a father like that, she would have hated Muggles, too. One instance of abuse was one too many, and she had no clue what else went on in that house of his; she'd never spoken with his father, Severus had made damn sure she kept away from Tobias Snape, and from the few times she'd met Eileen Snape, the woman had seemed unapproachable and cold, and certainly didn't seem to like the fact that Severus was friends with Lily (which was, in Lily's opinion, damned hypocritical, considering she was married to a Muggle, but this wasn't something she would ever tell her friend). Severus' relationship to Tobias was one of simple, mutual dislike that bordered on hatred; his relationship to Eileen was a completely mystifying, shapeless thing to Lily that she didn't dare poke at. One thing that had always, always come through quite clearly in spite of all this, though, was that Severus' household was not a loving one – it showed, painfully, in his every interaction with Lily, with Petunia, with Lily's parents, with other children and wizardfolk, with the whole wide world.

So yes, she knew his feelings were far from baseless. But did those reasons give him free pass on his behaviour? Until when? Forever?

When was too much?

It was exactly what Potter and Black had been saying, if not in so many kind words, and Lily utterly despised her mind for agreeing with those bullying ingrates, even a little bit. They had no leg to stand on, none whatsoever, to preach about actions and choices, when the only difference between them and Severus were their targets.

But it still stood, this blinding fact, that she couldn't, in good conscience, talk about fighting bigotry and hatred, and continue to excuse Severus' actions until the world collapsed. The one thing that gave her strength, enough strength to withstand the weight of her exhaustion and the derision of Potter's and Black's arguments, was that she knew Severus had never gone as far as she'd heard some of the older Slytherins had, in their time. The stories that still circled the school about Bellatrix Black made her nauseated, made chills run down her spine and the hairs on her arms rise up. And not just her; the Lestrange brothers, the Yaxley brothers, Malfoy and Rosier and those others who were rumoured to have become Death Eaters, the things that were said about them were so much worse than anything she'd ever witnessed Severus do, ever even suspected him of being involved in, and so long as he wasn't involved with _that_ , she knew she'd not give up on him.

But she did need to find a way of getting through to him, and for that, she needed to compose better arguments. Harping on about Mulciber and Avery and those other boys was only ever getting her his ire or silence, and those fights always ended up circling back to Potter and Black. She needed to have a go at his base beliefs instead, needed to make him see that Muggle-borns weren't Muggles, and that Muggles weren't all the way he saw them. She needed to make him understand that hurting others wasn't all right, whether they were just born different, or were doing nasty things themselves. She needed to make him _see_ that if he didn't stop, just _stop_ , with this path that he was on, with this yearning for magic that only ever corrupted, that poisoned everything it touched, that she'd lose him to that darkness that shadowed their friendship even now, that he was pushing their relationship into, that darkness that was drawing over him like Death's shroud in the guise of one charismatic extremist.

She needed to come up with a good strategy, and she needed to act on it, and she had no clue how to do either.

And that was the most exhausting realisation of all.

* * *

Sirius surreptitiously stared at his sandy-haired friend, careful not to be noticed, not that it was very likely – almost a week after the full moon, and Remus was completely back on his feet and currently engaged in what looked like a heated discussion with Lily Evans on some topic or other, no doubt tied to their O.W.L.s, which were drawing ever closer.

He felt his nose curl up in anger and his eyes narrow. Ever since Evans had come yelling at them two and a half months ago about that whole thing with the Whomping Willow and that Slytherin wanker, Remus had been pulling away from them and towards her, and it seemed like Sirius was the only one of them who was even aware of it.

First James with his infatuated obsession, and now Remus. Really, it was like she was some sort of Siren for Sirius' friends. He was expecting Peter to start following her around any day now, had even thought it would happen that time in the hospital wing when the pudgy boy had gone all red in the face just for receiving a 'thank you' from the red-haired girl.

Flexing his hand to relieve the cramp and tingles leftover from last summer – if that Wretched Woman continued in this manner, he wasn't going to be able to write by the time next school year rolled around – Sirius considered his options. There was no way James would listen to him, not with half his books having 'LE' scribbled all over them, and Remus was more likely to just pretend he was agreeing with Sirius and then do whatever he wanted anyway. Peter would be useless, too, he was far too frightened about his O.W.L.s to be able to focus on what Sirius would need, and the last thing Sirius wanted was to actually have to ingratiate himself with Evans.

No, what he needed was to draw her attention away. She was already pissed at James and him; if he could get her completely irate, she might just cut all contact with them altogether. James could do with a little silent treatment from her, anyway. Get him noticing other girls instead of fixating on the one that was delusional enough as to be defending that bloody Slytherin about Muggle-hating, of all things.

Well, if there was one thing that could provoke Evans like nothing else, it was going after Snivellus.

Leaving Remus to his study date, Sirius walked out of the school to a quiet corner and lit up a fag he'd filched from one of the sixth-year Muggle-borns.

Tabaco didn't do much for wizardkind, Sirius had found out, at least when rolled, set on fire and the smoke inhaled (it was a rather common potion-making ingredient, though, so it was easy to procure). Muggle-borns did seem affected to an extent, though the effects he'd heard described seemed mild in the extreme for them. For a Pure-blood like him, all he ever got was the lightly bitter taste in the back of his throat that he'd decided he liked, and the smell that would cling to him and annoy people around him (or attract girls; that had proven to be a surprisingly pleasant bonus). James had declared he didn't like the taste (more like didn't like the way girls wrinkled their noses up at him; he and Sirius did tend to attract a slightly different crowd of girls, at that), and Peter was too chicken-shit to even try. Remus was more amenable to a smoke or two, especially right before and after the full moon, as it seemed to help him keep better control of his furry problem.

But the calming effect for Sirius only ever came from the ritual of rolling up the cigarette and spending a few minutes inhaling the smoke, not from anything within the smoke affecting his nervous system, the way Remus had explained it worked for Muggles. He had periods when he smoked one on another – summers, most often, and specifically to annoy the Wretched Woman – after which he'd forget to do it for a month or two with none of those negative side-effects he'd heard described in conjunction with smoking. Which was quite practical, really; from what he'd heard, quitting this particular habit gave a lot of people quite a bit of trouble normally.

After finishing his smoke, Sirius pulled their Map out of his pocket and, after activating it, told it to point him towards Severus Snape. The Map showed Snivellus in the Transfigurations classroom, which most likely meant that Slytherins were having the class now while Gryffindors had the free period. That worked nicely for him, too, if he could get James before the bell rang.

Another wand tap, and he was calculating how long it would take him to run to the third floor study room and get James untangled from Mirabelle Howlsley (whoever she was; Sirius was rubbish at keeping track of their fangirls if they didn't interest him) in order to drag him up to the fifth floor for some fun. All things considered, he thought he could do it with minutes to spare.

As he'd expected, dragging James away from his snogging session wasn't too difficult; all he needed to do was mention Snivellus and an idea, and Mirabelle Howlsley (fourth-year Hufflepuff; _of course_ she was) was as remembered as last year's snow.

"Eh, there's loads better than her," was James' only comment when Sirius reminded him of her with a shake of his head towards the nearly-empty room. "What's the idea, then?"

The idea was to hide in that little invisible alcove off the east side of the Transfigurations corridor they'd discovered a few weeks back and have some fun at Snivelly's expense, with the added bonus of Remus distracting Evans down in the library. Snivellus made it easy for them, too, by walking out with his head stuck in their Transfigurations textbook instead of paying attention to where he was walking.

James used the Shoelace-Tying Charm on him from that book he'd gotten last summer, _From Acrobatic Arachnid Ambush to Zesty Zucchini Zapper, Practical Pranks for Every Occasion_ (Remus had called the title of that one 'inspired' in a very, very dry tone, Sirius remembered), and the sight of Snivellus tripping over his own feet, book flying out of his hands as he stumbled and almost fell face-down was magnificent entertainment. Sirius sent his own Tickling Hex, hitting Snivellus just as the greasy Slytherin was pulling out his wand, which resulted in him dropping the piece of wood where Sirius could kick it out of Snape's reach. They didn't need the repeat of last time.

"Tch, tch, tch," James said, coming out of the alcove to join Sirius where he stood over Snape, who was gasping through the hex and clutching his ribs. "You really should pay attention to where you're going, Snivellus. You never know when someone might... oh, I don't know, put their foot out, trip you up."

Sirius cancelled the spell, leaving the Slytherin to pant on the ground.

"You'd think he'd know better by now," he commented idly to James, shaking his head. "I guess he's a slow learner. Wouldn't you agree, Prongs?"

"Oh, definitely," James said with a smirk. "Good thing you have us, right, Snivelly?"

Sirius almost missed it, in his witty back-and-forth with James. Snivellus, with all the speed of his house's sigil, shot for his wand. Reacting on instinct (as he really didn't fancy any of that snake's more creative curses today), Sirius kicked out his foot just as Snivellus flipped on the ground to point his wand at the two of them; his foot connected with the Slytherin's wrist, encountering momentary resistance before ploughing on, and Snivellus' wand flew in a wide arc through the hall, over the heads of the students, to clatter down the stairs, while Snivellus himself released a pain-filled half-muffled yowl and cradled his hand to his chest.

"Hey, what's going on here?" a loud voice demanded to know; Sirius knew that one, too – Amir Shafiq was the Head Boy this year, a Hufflepuff that James and Sirius had learned long ago to steer clear of, because unlike most of his housemates, he tended to attack first and ask questions later, and there was simply no way that any of the Marauders could do anything to get themselves out of a fix if their mouths were glued shut and their bodies stuck to the wall.

Exchanging looks with his best friend, the two decided quickly enough that this was one situation they'd rather not be in, and so it was but a work of a moment to slip into the crowd and get lost.

And if Sirius happened to step with his heel on Snivellus' discarded wand, well, it was only an accident; after all, with so many people walking about, it really could have been absolutely anything under his foot.

* * *

"Were you fighting?" the Head Boy, a tall, forbidding-looking wizard whom Severus would have called Middle-Eastern, asked him. Through watering eyes, Severus gave him a glare and scrambled to his feet. His sides ached from the _Rictusempra_ , and his wrist was hurting so badly he wanted to howl in pain.

"I was minding my own damn business," he shot through gritted teeth, turning around to see where his wand had flown off to. "Mind yours."

"Whom were you fighting with?"

"Are you deaf, or just stupid? _I_ wasn't fighting; _they_ attacked _me_. _Accio_ my wand!"

Thankfully, his wandless magic was good enough even through the pain; when he'd first read about the spell back in his third year, Severus had made certain to practice it wandlessly for exactly these sorts of occasions.

To his sinking horror, what flew back to him from the bottom of the staircase wasn't his trusted wand, but rather two pieces of wood that used to be connected and were now very clearly broken. They landed in his numb hand, and Severus stared at them with all the desolation he was feeling at the thought – he was less than a month away from O.W.L.s, he was in constant danger from Potter's group and Slytherins alike, he'd still not managed to conjure a Patronus, he barely had any money for a Butterbeer, let alone anything else, and _his wand was broken_.

What the _fuck_ was he going to do?

The Head Boy manhandled him to the hospital wing, looking extremely annoyed all the while, but Severus barely paid him any mind, his head too full of desperation, because with his wand broken and not enough money to buy himself a new one, Severus was as good as completely lost. He'd failed Dumbledore, he'd failed Lily, he'd fail his O.W.L.s, and no doubt as soon as they learned, he'd be targeted by Potter and Black, this time to be dealt with in a more permanent manner. After all, they'd tried it once already, so what was to keep them from doing it again, especially now that he had no way of defending himself?

Maybe Lily'd– no, Severus' pride refused to let him grovel like some desperate beggar. There had to be some other way of getting together enough money for a trip to Diagon Alley to get another wand.

Though, of course, that'd mean asking for permission to leave the school for a day, and with how little Slughorn liked him, he'd end up having to ask the Headmaster. And there was no way he'd _ever_ be able to hide this from Dumbledore; keeping him from seeing the cracks in the wand had been hard enough, but this? To say nothing of the fact that this year's Head Boy knew all about it, had seen Severus summon a broken wand to himself.

Sharp pain in his wrist knocked him out of his own head, and Severus jerked his arm back, lifting his eyes to meet Madam Pomfrey's brown ones as she held his appendage firmly in place.

That's right, he was in the hospital wing, and Madam Pomfrey was fixing his wrist, because Sirius sodding Black had broken it with that kick.

"I can leave him in your care, then?" the Head Boy – Shafiq something-or-other, Severus remembered (and only because the Shafiq family was the only Pure-Blood family whose Arabian roots hadn't prevented them from being on the list of the Twenty-Eight) – asked the matron.

"Unless you saw who did this to him, yes," Madam Pomfrey confirmed. "I'll see to it that the Headmaster is notified."

"Good."

She stayed silent until the seventh-year was gone, before turning to Severus and shaking her head in anger. "Those hooligans," she muttered, lathering a Bruise-Reducer generously on his wrist. "They ought to be kicked out of the school."

"I don't need you to tell the Headmaster anything," Severus told her defensively. "They're nothing I can't handle on my own."

"Your wrist and your nose say differently, Mr Snape," Madam Pomfrey shot back. "Repeatedly. Now, hold still while I put the cast on."

"I don't need a cast!"

"Yes, you do. Only until the end of the week, until the healing strengthens. The wrist is far more delicate than long bones. And don't you dare remove it before I give you leave," she threatened. They had a glaring match, which Severus refused to lose, because there was no way in sodding hell he was _ever_ going to wear a _cast_.

Of course, this was one of those battles that he simply couldn't win; in the end, Madam Pomfrey's word was law so long as the students weren't in acceptable health, and having a broken wrist definitely counted.

It was the least of his worries, in the grand scheme of things. Broken wands were much harder to fix than broken bones, and his despondence at the situation quickly overcame any true fight he had in himself, so that the damned witch got her way in the end. At least the cast was nothing like those Muggle ones he'd had to wear as a child, lumpy and enormous; this one was almost like a very tight wrist glove that was keeping him from moving his wrist, and even came in black so that he could almost conceal it in his sleeve.

"No spellcasting until the wrist is completely healed," Madam Pomfrey warned with a look. "And no removing the cast until I say so."

"When?"

"Come see me on Sunday, and I'll decide."

Declaring Herbology class a lost cause (since he'd missed at least half of the class already), Severus instead retreated to the Slytherin Dungeons and his own bed. Gently pulling out the pieces of his wand, he placed them on the bed and tried to figure out what to do. There was no way he could fix the wand – though the break was rather close to the handle, the dragon heartstring core was torn, and even if he could conceivably glue the wood back together, there was nothing he could do for it.

He had maybe a Galleon, if he rifled through all of his things, including his books, and that was not nearly enough for a new wand – this one had cost him five Galleons, to his mother's eternal consternation (though he'd decided since his last talk with Dumbledore about trying to view old memories in new light that he was going to focus on the fact that she'd bought him the wand in spite of the price because she'd wanted him to be able to do magic properly, rather than because she didn't have access to any of the Prince family wands – as Dumbledore had pointed out when this had come up, she could have gone to a second-hand wand store if she'd wanted to, and she hadn't). He refused to ask Lily for help, and with everything else going on in his life, there was no chance he'd be going to any of the Slytherins for it, either. He knew perfectly well what being indebted to a Slytherin meant, and he'd worked hard not to put himself in that position in the past five years.

He got out of casting in class on account of the injury and thanked Merlin that he didn't have any classes with Gryffindors for the remainder of the week. He didn't expect Lily to accost him by the end of the day, demanding to know what had happened, but then, he'd not been paying proper attention to his surroundings for a while now (would that he had, Severus thought with consternation; maybe he'd have been better prepared for that sneak attack).

"Oh, they're getting a piece of my mind," Lily swore once she'd dragged the story out of him (Severus had tried to make himself sound a little better than he'd actually been, with debatable results). "Your wrist will be all right, though?"

"It's fine now," he assured her with a roll of his eyes. "Madam Pomfrey just loves adding to my misery, is all."

"I'm sure she knows what she's doing."

He managed to hide the state of his wand from her for the rest of the week, even though she'd somehow found ways of running into him in the corridors far more than was usual for either of them. Though surprised, he took it at face value and didn't question her about it too much, instead following Dumbledore's advice of simply accepting the happy moment for what it was and not doubting it too deeply. It wasn't something that came easily to him, and certainly something that would never be his first reaction, but if this was the last advice he'd get from the Headmaster, he wanted to get some use out of it.

Dumbledore, of course, discovered the secret regarding his wand within minutes of their next meeting on Friday evening, and it was all Severus could do to not get out of the man's office and never return.

"I will not expect an explanation," Dumbledore said once Severus had given him the pieces of his wand. "But if you wish to tell me, I will listen."

"I don't."

All he got as an answer was a slight nod as Dumbledore conjured a wand box and carefully placed the pieces in it.

"You will, of course, be allowed to travel to Diagon Alley tomorrow and procure a new wand."

And there came the inevitable elephant in Severus' head.

"About that..."

Well, he didn't have the money, that was the fact. He could either be ashamed of it or face the fact head-on, and Severus had far too much pride, especially standing in front of one of the most powerful men in existence, to be ashamed. Lifting his head, he met Dumbledore's eyes.

"I have no money for a new wand, sir," he said, fighting to keep his voice from trembling. Dumbledore eyed him in silence for what seemed like a very, very long time, before inclining his head.

"I will front you the money, Mr Snape," the old wizard said calmly, raising his hand to stop Severus' outburst. "I will not insult your intelligence, Severus, by assuming that you do not understand my reasons for our sessions. Should you choose to continue with your initial path and join Lord Voldemort, your debt to me will be the amount I pay for your wand, and I will expect the recompense by the end of your schooling. If, however, you change your mind and choose to ally with me, this will be my gift to you, which I hope you would accept with grace and good-will in which it is offered."

"That's it?"

"That is it. Severus, I will not blackmail you into choosing what I believe to be the right side; choices are what define us, and this must be yours, free of any possible strings. As the headmaster of this school, I have the obligation to insure that all students are able to complete their education, and that includes having a wand. All I can give you are the tools needed for it, and hopefully a little broader perception of the world. What you choose to do with them can and will be on you only."

Dropping into his chair, Severus put his head in his hands and tried to think this through. Obviously, this would be solving his problems quite neatly, and the fact that Dumbledore expected so little of him in return...

But he'd known that, hadn't he, he thought with self-deprecation. He'd expected something of the sort, that was why he'd said it in the first place, why he hadn't tried to manipulate Dumbledore about it, because he'd known that he'd have to be indebted to someone for the wand, and Dumbledore had been the lesser of two evils.

Dumbledore, for all his covert manipulation, at least didn't take him for a fool, and from everything Severus had learned about the man, stood behind his word. If he said all Severus would owe him would be the money, then that was how it would be. And, hadn't he admitted it just now, too? He was trying to change Severus mind, yes, but he wasn't doing it forcibly, and though he'd no doubt be disappointed, he'd let Severus go if he were to choose the Dark Lord over him.

Except, Severus didn't bloody know what he wanted to do anymore, and that was the biggest problem, because without a clear motivation, he ended up doing things like this without even being properly aware of them, and he couldn't bloody well afford to do that, could he, with everything going on in his life.

One thing, however, Severus _could_ take care of. Firming his resolve, he lifted his head and nodded at Dumbledore.

"Thank you, sir. I... I really appreciate it."

Better the devil you know than the one you don't, Lily's father had said once. That was exactly how Severus felt, as he arranged when to come to Dumbledore's office tomorrow morning. At least with Albus Dumbledore, he had some idea of what he was getting into, especially since it was for just a few sodding Galleons.

* * *

Mr Ollivander didn't seem to have changed in the five years that Severus hadn't seen him. Short, rail-thin and wrinkly, he looked as old as Dumbledore, though he had to have been at least a few decades younger. He also still had that strange disconcerting look about him, as if he could see far deeper into people than others could.

"I am sorry to hear about your wand, Mr Snape," he said once Dumbledore had explained everything. They'd Flooed directly into Ollivander's shop, and even that had left Severus on edge; if someone were to learn that Dumbledore was taking him to get a wand, there would be hell to pay. "May I see it?"

Ollivander took his sweet time inspecting it, too, tutting and shaking his head as he studied each part of it.

"Yes, I see."

"See what?" Severus asked him.

"Have you had any problem performing magic with your wand lately, Mr Snape?"

"No. And besides, that's got nothing to do with it. Someone _stepped_ on my wand, it didn't break by itself, for Merlin's sake! And _I_ certainly did nothing to it!"

"Mr Snape."

Shutting his mouth abruptly, Severus clenched his fists instead, feeling embarrassed by refusing to look down. Ollivander studied him for a moment longer, before nodding lightly and retreating into the depths of his store. While they waited, Severus stubbornly avoided Dumbledore's eye and refused to join him where the old wizard had situated himself on one of the chairs along the wall, feeling a mix of embarrassment, humiliation and just plain discomfort.

"Very well, then," Ollivander said, coming back with several boxes. "You know the works, Mr Snape, so let us try and find you a new wand. Ash and unicorn hair, ten and three quarter inches – no, that won't do – I don't know if you are aware, Mr Snape, but there is a great difference between purchasing a first wand, and a second wand. For one thing, wands tend to mature with their wielders, and so it would be quite pointless for me to offer you a wand that is exactly the same as your first one, as I am certain it would no longer suit you properly. Hawthorne and dragon heartstring, eleven and one quarter inches – hm, no – There is also the matter of the maturity of your magical core, of course; certain wands are unwilling to accept wielders who have not fully matured in this regard. Elm and phoenix feather, ten and a half inches – absolutely not..."

And so on and so forth it went; Ollivander continued to expound on the various aspects of his art whilst pulling out one wand after another and offering them to Severus, sometimes letting him fully cast a spell, and sometimes immediately pulling it out of his hands. And the bigger the pile of discarded wands grew, the more he seemed excited, though not in the way he'd been the first time – this time, he appeared almost confused.

"Hm... very well, let us try this," he said in the end, when they'd gone through a whole pile of them, taking a wand box from under the counter and pulling out a polished black wand, longer than most of the others he'd been offering before. "Ebony and dragon heartstring, thirteen and three quarter inches, rigid. Give it a try, Mr Snape."

The moment he grasped the handle, Severus knew this was the one he'd be taking home; reminiscent of the first time five years ago, there was a pleasant warmth emanating from it, and the wand released a shower of sparks the colour of Lily's eyes.

To Severus' surprise, Ollivander's eyebrows drew together, and he gave Severus a worried once-over.

"This is... unexpected," he murmured, stepping away from the counter and completely ignoring the wand boxes that began floating to the back of the shop of their own accord. "Could you perform a spell for me, Mr Snape? The Levitation Charm will do."

Somewhat confused, Severus did as he was bid, casting _Wingardium Leviosa_ on the wand's box. To his surprise, the box shot up far more violently than it usually did, and there _was_ a little resistance from the wand, though not nearly as much as Severus had felt ever since his old one had first cracked.

His actions didn't seem to satisfy Ollivander in the least, making him shake his head instead.

"How does it feel?"

"Er... fine?"

"Any resistance?"

He shrugged; this was the wand, he could feel it straight in his magical core, and he wasn't going to say anything to Ollivander to change his mind.

"May I?"

"It's not mine yet," he muttered, a little waspishly, and handed it over to the old man, who proceeded to inspect it thoroughly. Finally, sighing, he placed it back into its box and offered it to Severus.

"That will be eight Galleons and seven Sickles."

While Severus squawked at that (because what in seven hells?), Dumbledore rose from his seat and smoothly handed over the money to the wandmaker.

"We are much obliged, Garrick," the Headmaster said with a smile. "Thank you for accommodating us on such short notice."

"Not to worry, not to worry," Ollivander said. "I assume you will be using my Floo again?"

"If you would be so kind."

Severus went first and, while he waited for Dumbledore to come through, he studied his new wand, trying to figure out why in the world Ollivander had reacted so strangely to it choosing him. It was over four inches longer than the other one, and looked more respectable, as well, polished and straighter, with a handsome handle. He remembered how it had been the last time – it had been one of the rare times when his mother had agreed to spend any time in Lily's company, as her parents had no clue how to get to Diagon Alley, and Lily had begged him to take her with. Mr and Mrs Evans hadn't gone with them, his mother had put her foot down on that front, but Lily hadn't complained, only told Severus later that she'd taken her parents and Petunia with her there the following week to show them. They'd gotten their wands at Ollivander's together, and he'd been so very happy to finally have his own wand – at least until they'd come home and he'd had to hide it where his father wouldn't discover it, as he'd been very much against Severus coming to Hogwarts during that time.

He'd liked his old wand a lot, had learned so much magic with it. But this one – this one called to him in a way that one hadn't. He didn't know why, but it felt more right than the last one.

Dumbledore came through the Floo, dusting his robes off a little, and offered Severus a twinkly-eyed look.

"Well, then, Mr Snape. Would you like to try it out?"

Unable to hold back a smile, Severus thought back to that first trip to Diagon Alley, when he'd been a small, excited child seeing things for the first time anew through Lily's impressionable, exuberant eyes as she'd held his hand and tugged him forward from one shop to the next, as if wishing to take everything in and not knowing where to start.

" _Expecto Patronum_!"

The mist that form felt more powerful than before, but it still did not hold a corporeal form. Still, Severus felt the strength of it, the way this wand channelled his magic differently, and for a moment, that was quite enough.

* * *

 **A/N:** The details about Remus' lycanthropy are my own invention for the most part, as there's no detailed explanation either in canon or in accompanying materials, and I wanted to expand a bit on it. Ditto for tobacco and its effect on wizardfolk - I just always found it jarring when I read about people in HP verse smoking (ironic, considering Sirius' scene here, huh), and wanted to make an in-universe context for it. If I'm misremembering, be sure to let me know, but I don't think there was even any talk of pipe use, let alone cigarettes or cigars. Amir Shafiq is an OC, but the Shafiq family isn't; they are, in fact, listed as one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight.


	9. First Interlude: The Wandmaker

**First Interlude: The Wandmaker**

 _Professor Dumbledore,_

 _You_ _'_ _ve asked me, the last time we saw each other, why I seemed reluctant to sell the young student you had brought to my store, a Mr Severus Snape, the wand that had chosen him_ _–_ _ebony, dragon heartstring, thirteen and three quarter inches._

 _It is not in my nature to reveal such information; indeed, being a wandmaker, I have come to understand, is much the same as being a connoisseur of human nature itself. I must understand the personality of my customer in order to properly judge which type of wand_ _–_ _the wood and core combination, the characteristics of the wood, the length, each of which carry their own significance_ _–_ _might possibly find in them its companion. As such, I know far more about a great many people of our world than most others currently living, and this knowledge places on me a responsibility towards guarding the privacy of my customers._

 _However, as I find myself still unsettled by the sale these several days later, I am consciously_ _–_ _and with great doubts still_ _–_ _choosing to divulge my concerns, and with them, my knowledge of the young Mr Snape._

 _Mr Snape first came to me five years ago; I knew his mother, of course, and was familiarised with her family situation upon the receipt of the list of children who would be purchasing their wands for the year in which he began his studies. His first wand_ _–_ _dragon heartstring and walnut wood, nine and a half inches, unyielding_ _–_ _was, therefore, no true surprise for me, though it had taken me a while to suggest it for the pairing, as I had hoped some other would be willing to choose Mr Snape first._

 _I do not know how familiar you are with wandlore, and I shall therefore lay out some simple, yet undeniable truths that my family, and especially my grandfather, father and I, have used to guide us in the art of wandmaking (and are, indeed, the cause for our prosperity in this highly specialised field):_

 _Firstly, the core is responsible for successful channelling and amplification of magic. For this reason, only cores that come from magical creatures should be used, and the more magical the creature, the better the wand will perform. It should come as no surprise to you, then, that we have chosen to use only body parts coming from dragons, phoenixes and unicorns, as these three are considered to be the most magical creatures in existence. Admittedly, certain other creatures can be included in this group, but for simplicity_ _'_ _s sake, I shall not go in this letter into the reasons for why we do not use any of them in our wandmaking._

 _Secondly, the wood is the conduit between the wandwielder and the wand itself. It is the wood_ _'_ _s magical properties_ _–_ _as there are only certain types of trees that can give the wood for a wand, and of those, each tree is different from every other, though they share great similarities in their preferences_ _–_ _that determine how the wand will perform, behave and otherwise be of use. The wood types differ greatly between themselves, even when they come from the same family, in which wielder they are attracted to, and as you are aware, a wand_ _'_ _s congeniality towards the wielder is of vital importance for successful casting._

 _Thirdly, the length of a wand, I have found, most often reflects the size of the wielder_ _'_ _s personality; while there does seem to be some correlation between the height of the wielder and the wand length, this appears to hold far less importance than the wielder_ _'_ _s personality. Therefore, the length of the wand can immediately inform a knowing person of at least one aspect of said wand_ _'_ _s wielder._

 _Lastly, the flexibility of the wand is, like its length, reflective of the wielder_ _'_ _s personality. Namely, it reflects the degree of adaptability and willingness to change that the wielder, and with them the wand as well, exhibit._

 _One further note that I have to make is that wands influence their wielders as much as the wielders influence the wands; all wands will encourage certain behaviour and discourage other, usually by being extremely difficult to coerce into performing those feats of magic that they do not feel suited to them. Therefore, when I choose a wand for a child to try, I attempt to offer first those that I feel would benefit the child in the long term, and one that would, hopefully, balance their negative personality traits._

 _Having explained all this, I will now attempt to give you a more thorough insight into why, exactly, Mr Snape_ _'_ _s wands have given me unrest._

 _The first wand, unyielding nine and a half inches wand made of walnut and with a core of dragon heartstring, though properly suited to Mr Snape at age eleven, would not have been my preferred choice. This is because walnut wood, while highly suited to extreme intelligence_ _–_ _and, indeed, I am certain you have observed that Mr Snape does possess unusually high intelligence for both his age and his background_ _–_ _is also a wand that craves variability and experimentation, a trait I have found rather stunted in those witches and wizards who come from impoverished and uncaring upbringings. Of further interest to you will be the fact that, once subjugated, walnut wands are not in any way, morally or otherwise, discriminate in what magic they perform, and this can easily lead to them being extremely destructive, if in the hands of the unscrupulous. Perhaps this would not be a great problem in itself_ _–_ _while walnut is not by any means my favourite wood to work with, I have sold walnut wands that have gone on to perform acts of great admiration_ _–_ _however, in the case of Mr Snape_ _'_ _s first wand, the wood of walnut was paired with a surprisingly short length for such intellect as walnut usually seeks, being only nine and a half inches and thus indicating something of a deficient personality, as well as being unyielding, which served to dampen the walnut_ _'_ _s insistence on experimentation and invention. Having learned from you that Mr Snape greatly favours potion-making, I can in retrospect see why his first wand had chosen him, however, these three wand traits combined cast Mr Snape in a somewhat unflattering image_ _–_ _that of a hard, closed-minded personality with extreme intellect. It, therefore, did not surprise me in the least that Mr Snape had been sorted into Slytherin House, though the conclusion this led me to I found distressing_ _–_ _namely, that Mr Snape was not headed for any positive future. Added to this was the wand core_ _–_ _dragon heartstring of a particularly volatile Peruvian Vipertooth_ _–_ _which by its very nature could easily be turned towards the Dark Arts, and combined with the walnut wood, held no true barriers to this, either._

 _You can imagine my surprise, then, when you informed me that not only would Mr Snape be needing a new wand, but that you would come with him personally and pay for it. I had held, perhaps unrealistically, some hopes that Mr Snape had defied my expectations and not gone down the path his wand_ _'_ _s preference seemed to suggest was likely (and perhaps even inevitable)._

 _Yet what I found was exactly that which I had believed Mr Snape to be, if perhaps more conflicted with himself than seemed plausible_ _–_ _and, indeed, why I had offered him several hawthorne wands, as they tend to gravitate towards conflicted natures (as you had been witness yourself to, none of them chose him). I could not understand why you had chosen to honour him with such a gift as a new wand, and was doubtful that what I perceived to be generosity on your part_ _–_ _namely, your attempt to change Mr Snape_ _'_ _s chosen path_ _–_ _would be successful._

 _So, I imagine you can understand my distress_ _–_ _and indeed utmost confusion_ _–_ _when the wand that I had sold him chose him._

 _Mr Snape_ _'_ _s second wand_ _–_ _rigid ebony wand of thirteen and three quarter inches with Hungarian Horntail heartstring_ _–_ _speaks of a personality that is almost diametrically opposite to the one I have observed possessed of the young man in question. Ebony wood, like walnut, chooses intelligence as one of the foremost traits. However, where walnut chooses flexible intelligence geared towards outward exploration, ebony refuses to perform properly for any who have not the courage and conviction to be true to themselves. Wielders of ebony wands are most often non-conformist outsiders who do not seek the approval of any around them, but find themselves happy to walk to their own internal beat. Where walnut wand wielders can shift their tendencies, beliefs and allegiances, those of ebony wands cannot be influenced by others except in extreme circumstances and very rarely can be swayed from their chosen path._

 _Furthermore, where Mr Snape_ _'_ _s first wand was on the short end of the length spectrum, his second wand is on the long end, being almost fourteen inches; this is such an extreme size difference as I have truly rarely seen_ _–_ _I believe four times since I apprenticed with my father in the year 1927. Such difference I would expect to be able to note when speaking with Mr Snape, yet I did not have the impression that he had changed much in this regard since the last time I had spoken with him. As to the wand flexibility, while both rigid and unyielding denominate hard wands, and thus hard, inflexible people_ _–_ _in general unyielding wands detest any changes in their wielders_ _'_ _personalities, while rigid wands simply choose those similar to them in this regard, but my experience has taught me that they often disregard the little flexibilities their wielders indulge in, so long as the changes are never drastic, as this often leads to rigid wands simply breaking._

 _To close my observations off, this particular wand is possessed of a heartstring of a Hungarian Horntail, which is known as the most dangerous and volatile dragon species, and whose heartstrings are most always of wands destined for great deeds, be they good or evil. I have but rarely been in possession of this species_ _'_ _heartstrings (which will explain to you the rather steep price of the wand), and, much like the wands I_ _'_ _ve crafted from the two tail feathers your phoenix has graciously given me, this wand is one whose fate I find of personal importance. Considering the person the first of those two wands has chosen, you can, I hope, understand my reluctance in giving ebony and heartstring wand to yet another young man with such obvious leanings towards Dark._

 _Mr Snape_ _'_ _s current wand is one that is by no means for a child; indeed, I had not expected it to accept anyone in their minority, and it has refused to perform any magic for all those whom I had offered it to in the years since I_ _'_ _ve crafted it. I had offered it to Mr Snape perhaps as my personal whimsy, and I can assure you that I had not expected it to choose Mr Snape in the least. That it had gives me a very conflicting picture of the young man, one that differs drastically between what I have found observable, and what his wand has observed. I cannot elaborate further on this point, and this is the cause for my distress, not only as a salesman with a reputation to uphold, but also as a wandmaker who had believed himself quite knowledgeable in his own craft._

 _I do implore you to keep a close eye on Mr Snape, as it might be that the wand is simply sensing what has not yet become clear to us. The wand that has chosen him is one of extreme power and potential, and I fear for those who are faced with it. Additionally, this wand is one that will encourage Mr Snape rather strongly in a direction it wishes him to take, one that suits the wand best, and if he does indeed continue in what I have observed of his chosen path, it will be truly a feat to convince him of any sort of change. I do not wish to see him fall prey to the wielder of the yew wand we both regret was sold to its owner, and I hope that by giving you this information, I have helped you, at least in some small part, in influencing the young man towards a better future._

 _Please do let me know how this situation develops, and whether there is anything more that I might be of help with._

 _With great regard_

 _Respectfully yours,_

 _Garrick Ollivander, MWl_

* * *

 **A/N:** All the specifics regarding the two wands with respect to their build (wood types, cores, length and flexibility) are drawn from information given on Pottermore and/or HP wikia. For those who like researching stuff like I do, if you feel I've misjudged anything in my choices of Severus' wands (if you think something else might have been better suited to him), do let me know, as well as your reasoning; I'd love to hear more about this topic, since I've not seen it mentioned almost at all in fanfiction. **  
**


	10. Ch I,8: The Formation of Inevitability

**A/N:** I'm putting up a warning for excessive swearing in this chapter; while I never shy away from using swearwords where I feel it's appropriate, I do think that it can get tacky if overused (plus, I'm not completely clear on whether too many swearwords push past the T rating; I'd think not, but then I was a very progressive teen in my time). In this situation, however, I felt it not only appropriate, but necessary. You'll see what I mean.

* * *

 **Chapter 8: The Formation of Inevitability**

 _Lily,_

 _Here are the books you asked for; is there something else you_ _'_ _ll be needing from me? Some music records, perhaps? No, I_ _'_ _ve forgotten; you said electricity doesn_ _'_ _t work with magic. Though maybe there is some sort of gramophone-like magical thing at your school; nothing I can know, of course, so excuse my ignorance._

 _And you_ _'_ _re right; all this_ _'_ _social justice_ _'_ _nonsense really isn_ _'_ _t something I_ _'_ _m interested in. People aren_ _'_ _t equal and they never will be. Thinking that this is not the way the world works is absolutely stupid. There_ _'_ _s order in the society, and designated places for every group. You will only get put down if you don_ _'_ _t see this, for pushing this communist idea of_ _'_ _everyone is equal_ _'_ _, if not for your own incompetence at filling places not suited to you. But I_ _'_ _ll tell you one thing_ _–_ _at least you have magic, Lily. You_ _'_ _re always so very proud of that, so perhaps you_ _'_ _re incapable of understanding what I_ _'_ _m talking about. Not that this would surprise me; you_ _'_ _ve really taught me how not to be surprised by anything you do anymore. It just strikes me as interesting that in all your ramblings in that letter you sent me_ _–_ _the first one in months, notably_ _–_ _you never once mention the whole wide world that_ _'_ _s not in on the secret, not if it doesn_ _'_ _t directly relate to you. But I suppose it_ _'_ _s easy to lose track of things that you consider less important than your own agenda._

 _My preparation for the A-levels is going well. I have no intention of going to uni; why would I? I don_ _'_ _t know how it_ _'_ _s done in your society, but in mine, uni is for those freakish women who intend to have_ _'_ _careers_ _'_ _, and I certainly am not going to be one of them. I will do as Mother_ _'_ _s done, and take a typing course for secretarial work, and when I get married, I will be a wife. A proper wife, and nothing of the kind I_ _'_ _m certain you_ _'_ _re planning. To hear you speak, Lily, you_ _'_ _d want to be an activist! If you do, it is a good thing no one knows about your world, because you would just end up embarrassing Mother. If you can force yourself, think of her in all this, please._

 _I see you are still friends with Snape; I have said all I wanted to on the subject long ago, and have no intention of doing so again. But what you are remembering of childhood, I am forced to disagree. You are the younger child, and for you, perhaps, life was simple. For me, who am the older child, it never was. I don_ _'_ _t imagine you will ever understand that, either._

 _You did not ask for any proper news from home, so I imagine you expect that Mother_ _'_ _s written everything to be said on this subject, as well. You would be wrong, of course; I have no doubt she has decided not to burden you with her difficulties, being how she is so very concerned for your education. However, I will do so now: Father has been offered a Senior Lecturer position at University of Bristol, and he has declined it. Mother has been extremely angry with him for it, and I agree with her; neither of us can understand this love of Cokeworth that you and Father have. I for one would like to move away at the earliest opportunity. But it seems that this is one of the rare times that she will not get her way, since everything she_ _'_ _s tried so far has failed. I am sure you will be glad to hear this; you will have at least another summer to spend with Snape._

 _Good luck on your O-levels._

 _Petunia_

 _P.S. Are you incapable of understanding that I detest that god-awful nickname, Lily? Or do you simply prefer to disregard my wishes because of your own amusement?_

* * *

"What are you reading?"

Blinking her stinging eyes, Lily looked up from her book to find Severus hovering near her shoulder, black eyes peering down at the text in her hands. His hair looked like he'd not washed it in a week, which probably meant he'd spent significant time recently brewing in one of the many out-of-the-way toilets, and his eyes looked a little blood-shot, though he didn't seem to have any of Lily's other symptoms.

That meant only one other thing.

"How long were you up last night?"

He rolled his eyes at her and leaned forward to scan the open page of her book.

"This doesn't look like any textbook we've got."

"Because it's not," she replied distractedly. "You don't look that well, Sev. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," he replied, growing irritated. "I've got things on my mind."

"What things?"

"Doesn't matter. And you don't look much better, yourself."

Lily snorted, a little hollowly. She knew she looked a right sight, with her stuffy nose and her swollen eyes and aching sinuses.

"I caught a cold," she explained, "and I should be studying, but I asked Tuney to send me some books, and now I can't resist reading them instead."

"Did you go to Madam Pomfrey?"

"No; actually, I wanted to see if you'd mind brewing some Pepper-Up for me?"

In truth, it would have been far easier to just go to the hospital wing, but since potion brewing and Sev went inseparably in her mind, she'd thought it would be altogether better to ask him for help – if nothing else, she thought that might appease him a little bit about what had happened last month (even if he'd seemed quite forgiving about her not showing up before lunch when she'd said she would, Lily couldn't help but think that he was still a bit upset about it, though that was maybe just her guilt speaking, both for forgetting _again_ and for technically blaming it on the castle instead of copping to the truth; but, to be fair, it _was_ in part the castle's fault, so she wasn't really lying so much as leaving certain details out). Plus, she wanted to talk about Tuney's letter, and as much as she knew her sister and Severus despised one another, her first instinct had still been to show it to him, rather than Mary. It was part of her life outside of Hogwarts (one that she was determined to expand, when her head wasn't aching from her sinuses being too big for her skull) and sharing it with anyone but Severus felt pear-shaped.

"Do you have the access to the laboratory still?"

Nodding her head, she closed her book – _The Militant Suffragettes_ by Antonia Raeburn, because apparently Tuney had either picked up the first book that had the words 'suffragette' on the cover, or else was trying to make a very pointed statement (and considering the way she usually acted towards Lily, and that letter she'd sent with the book, the latter option could have very well been the case) – and packed up her stuff. They walked together out of the library and to the main staircase, and in the five or so minutes it took them to get to her designated private laboratory, she ended up sneezing about eight times and having to blow her nose with such loud honking that it made her already ruddy cheeks tomato red.

"Merlin, I hate this," she near enough whined, holding her soggy handkerchief and wondering if she could just chug it into a suit of armour, instead of putting it in her pocket. "Every damn spring."

"I can mix up something to clear your sinuses, too, if you want," Severus offered.

"Oh, _thank you_ ," she answered emphatically. The hardest part of having a cold was that she had to breathe through her mouth, which always left her throat irritatingly scratchy. She wouldn't have even minded the fatigue and headaches – they were common enough these days from studying even when she was perfectly healthy – but a stuffy nose was more than a trial.

She ended up resting her arms on the workbench and her cheek on her crossed fingers as she watched Severus set everything up to brew her the Pepper-Up. Hazily, she marvelled at his efficiency – there was no movement wasted, no single ingredient forgotten, no hesitance or nervousness. Outside, among the school populace, he was almost a twitching spider, gangly and hunched and with his greasy hair always falling in his eyes. Here, though, surrounded by his beloved brewing equipment, he was a monument of efficiency, a bat swooping through the twilight hunting insects, always with perfect certainty of purpose.

She'd almost forgotten how well self-assurance suited him.

"You should be a potions master," she murmured as he lit the fire under the cauldron and added water. "Then you could invent something spectacular and become famous."

Severus gave her an indecipherable look, part confused and part worried and part flattered, if she was reading it right at all (well, the flattered was in the red splotches on his cheeks, not in his eyes, but it was all the same to her).

"I think you'd be the one to do that," he murmured, low enough Lily had to repeat his words to herself twice in order to grasp their meaning. Her ears felt a little clogged, too.

"Invent potions?"

"No, charms," he corrected.

"I dunno. Maybe I'll be an Auror instead."

"What?" he asked, a little more sharply than she'd have expected it. "I thought you said Charms Mastery..."

"I did. But McGonagall said I should consider more than one option, so that I'm not stuck without necessary N.E.W.T.s if I end up changing my mind for some reason."

"And your alternative is to be an _Auror_?"

Blinking, she peered at him, taken aback by the vehemence of his reaction. It wasn't abating, as she'd thought it would; on the contrary, he seemed to be growing more and more agitated.

"Yes? I suppose I could plan for a potioneering mastery, but most of the N.E.W.T.s I'd need for that are the same as for a charmwork mastery, and honestly, I love potioneering, but you know my creativity is in charmwork. And I'd rather be an Auror than a potioneer anyway."

"You do realise there's a _war_ out there, right?"

Straightening up, Lily wiped her itching nose distractedly with the ridge of her hand. She barely even noticed it came away completely wet with snot.

"Are you honestly asking me that? Honestly? I'm _Muggle-born_ , Severus! That war, the smear campaigns and the extremist hatred-spewing bloodism that's infected even the _Daily Prophet_ , the disappearances and _deaths_ , that's me, my cause. And if the best way for me to help with that is by being an Auror, than Charms Mastery can wait until there isn't a fundamentalist dark wizard threatening to start mass murder of my kind out–"

She dissolved into a coughing fit – damn this blasted cold to seven _hells_! – and her throat felt on fire from what had grown into a violent exclamation.

Severus looked a little pale when she finally managed to get the phlegm up and spit it into the sink. Her mouth felt disgusting, tasting of that horrid bitter way that all snot did, so she rinsed her mouth out and wiped it with the handkerchief.

"Can you really make me that thing for the sinuses?" she felt the need to check, a little pleadingly (and all right, if it was perhaps a little more pleading than was necessary, well, she was entitled; she _was_ Sev's best friend, and she was sick, dammit).

"Yes, of course."

When the potions were well on their way, and Lily, having had time to let go of her irritation, had gotten to enjoy watching Severus in his natural environment as much as she liked, he returned back to the topic of Auror Training.

"It's dangerous, Lily. The mortality rate–"

"It's a war."

"Exactly! And you want to be on the front lines."

"Let's not exaggerate," she said, cocking her head to the side and licking her dry lips with her dry tongue. "I know everyone's calling it a war, but we've not heard of any Auror dying yet, have we? It's like the Cold War, propaganda and spying and threats and all that political stuff. There aren't actual front lines or anything."

"So if you want to help, why be an Auror? Why not be a politician?"

"Because the political system is corrupt, and if I want to get anywhere in it, then I'd have to be corrupt, too, and I won't," she said tartly, feeling certain on this point. "Besides, the Auror Office is part of the Department for Magical Law Enforcement. I'd do more good there."

"In case there _is_ an actual war, you mean?"

"I'm going to fight for Muggle-born rights either way, Severus, whether I'm a Charms Master or an Auror."

"It's dangerous!"

"Well, life is dangerous!" she shouted back, smacking her palms on the work bench. "It doesn't mean fights shouldn't be fought. And don't tell me you're planning to sit this war out, Severus. If you were, you wouldn't be spending time with wannabe Death Eaters."

"They're my _friends_ , Lily! Like Macdonald and Babineaux and Summerville are yours!"

Clenching her jaw against the instinctive urge to push their argument in that direction – she'd told herself she wouldn't, because it hadn't worked the previous ten thousand times she'd tried it – Lily instead decided to go for open bluntness.

"And when they get out of here, they'll be joining Voldemort, and I'll be joining Dumbledore, so I honestly don't know how you imagine you can be friends with the both of us."

Severus inhaled sharply and his already pale complexion turned the colour of curdled milk; Lily honestly couldn't figure out why he looked for all the world like she'd punched him in the gut.

"What..." he began, stopping to lick his lips, "what are you saying, Lily?"

She echoed her own words back to herself, and suddenly, she was terrified, in that cold-hands, cold-sweat, gut-churning way, as terrified as Severus looked, because it hit her that her words had sounded like an ultimatum, and she wasn't ready for that yet, she _wasn_ _'_ _t ready_ to give up, in spite of her exhaustion and her resentment and disappointment, she wasn't ready to give up on him and their friendship.

There wasn't anything else for it really – she backpedalled.

"I just meant that you'll have to choose a side, Severus, and the other one won't want you. _I_ won't want you if you become a Death Eater. That's my breaking point, I can't be friends with you if you decide to openly support someone who'd want to segregate me and people like me, who'd want to put us in a corner and act like we're lepers, like, like... like Jews in Germany thirty years ago!"

"That's not what he wants to do."

"Oh, don't be naïve," she snapped at him past a mild bout of coughing that she couldn't even be bothered to acknowledge. "He wants us to designate our magical origin, the _Daily Prophet_ has been on about that for months! It starts with identification, and it seems like it's not that radical, because, hey, what's the big deal about stating if you're Half-blood or Muggle-born, and don't we already know all the Pure-blood families anyway, but that's exactly how Hitler started it in the thirties, and look where that ended up going – people being rounded up, experimented on, gassed and shot and eliminated! Or this idea of..." she had to break to cough again, wincing at the sandpaper-like feeling in her throat, but continued as soon as she'd gotten her breath, "of racial segregation that was in America for half a century. That's not so different from the magical world, isn't it, separate but equal, and we all just _love_ that, there's a whole international wizarding body created to enforce it, so what's the big deal about segregating Muggle-borns from Pure-bloods, it's the same thing! That's what he stands for, Severus! If he had his way, you and me wouldn't be going to school together! I wouldn't get to come to Hogwarts! Maybe I wouldn't even be allowed to practice magic at all!"

She sneezed three times in succession, the urge coming over her violently enough that she didn't have time to pull out the handkerchief, and as a consequence, she ended up with runny, yellowish snot all over her cupped hands. Screaming in impotent anger, she stomped her way to the sink and washed off her hands, taking the time to blow her nose – it did nothing for her congestion, but at least she'd have five or ten minutes without sneezing fits.

"I feel disgusting," she moaned, feeling the irrational urge to be seven years old again, cocooned in a nest of blankets, hugged and fussed over. She hated it, because it made her feel resentful that Severus wasn't the type of person who'd do something like that, though she wanted him to. Instead, he was again pushing her buttons and being a complete idiot about it, and it was only making her feel absolutely miserable.

"Here, the Pepper-Up is almost done," Severus said softly, and she dragged herself back to the workbench. It took Severus about ten minutes, which they both spent in total silence, to finish brewing and bottle the two potions, and in those ten minutes, Lily berated herself for going on a tangent like this, when she'd planned on trying to reason with Severus about it. She knew he'd just dismiss her words, that's what he always did in their fights, and if only she'd come at it from a calm, collected perspective, maybe he would have at least not been automatically on the defensive. But her cold had been making her irritable for going on thee days now, and his apparent ignorance at the real state of the world and their role in it was just galling.

She chugged the Pepper-Up, which began working in moments, steaming the yuckiness out by the ears, relieving her scratchy throat and calming the itch in her lungs, and what a bloody relief that was, that she didn't feel like something was crawling all around her ribcage. Her sinuses felt miles better already, though they were still swollen enough even with the Pepper-Up working its magic (literally, and sometimes the word interplay did make her smile to herself) on her respiratory system.

"The nasal solution should be dripped into your nose," he explained when she reached for it, so she turned around on the chair and leaned her head back, giving him an expectant look when he didn't move to help her.

His hesitance was, frankly, completely ridiculous, but then that was par for the course in Lily's opinion. Of the two, she was the tactile one, grabbing his hand to pull him when she wanted to get somewhere in a hurry, bumping her elbow with his when they walked down the street, offering hugs when he seemed too gloomy for her taste. Severus really didn't initiate physical contact, and even when he received it, he was stiff and almost confused as to what he was supposed to do in return. Their hugs were usually a very strange – almost awkward – affair, where Lily gave him a quick squeeze, and Severus usually just stood stiff as a board. It was a good thing she'd gotten over his seeming unwillingness for it back before Hogwarts, because otherwise she imagined he'd end up spending months without touching anyone.

He dug out a dropper out of a drawer and moved to hover above and to the side of her, while she looked up at him with a small smile. This way, she could see his face haloed by the curtain of greasy black hair, and though his nose looked large, the bump on it wasn't as prominent.

"It'll probably taste horribly," he warned, "and after a minute or two, you'll need to blow it all out, but it should help with the swelling as well as the mucus, and you can use it even when the Pepper-Up wears off."

"Good."

She had a stray thought, as he moved the dropper to one of her nostrils, that it was a shame he never looked after his physical image. Lily knew the woe of spots, of course; she'd started getting them relatively soon after her first period back in third year, though she was luckier than Bettina, whose whole face tended to break out into red and white pustules from time to time. Severus had some, too, mostly around the jawline and where she imagined his beard would be. Had his beard even started coming out yet? Potter and Black liked to sport stubble from time to time, no doubt because they thought they looked cool – admittedly, Black's did, in fact, seem to have gotten to the point of being more than just a peach fuzz, but Potter had patches of it, and it just looked ridiculous from certain angles – but Lily couldn't remember Severus ever mentioning it. His cheeks were certainly smooth now, but did that mean he was shaving, or that he hadn't started getting the beard yet? Maybe that would have hidden the spots, though she didn't think she'd like Sev with full-on beard. And his teeth, crooked and somewhat yellowing, though his breath never smelled stale that she could tell, those didn't help either.

She blinked instinctively when he dropped the solution, first into one nostril, then into the other, and it burned a path all the way into her throat, confirming that its taste was disgustingly sour-bitter. Severus seemed to take a moment to make certain he'd done it properly, black eyes scanning her face, before moving away. A minute of breathing through her mouth, and Lily almost felt the stuffing of her sinuses become watery, slipping into her throat and making her gag.

She blew her nose in the sink, spat out all of the nastiness form her throat, and when she finally washed her mouth and wiped her face with a towel Severus conjured for her, she could breathe properly again.

It was heaven.

" _Thank you_ ," she said emphatically, giving him what felt like too wide a smile.

"Lily..." he took a deep breath, as if bracing for something, then ploughed on with grim determination, "I don't want you training to be an Auror."

All her good mood vanished in a blink as sheer annoyance rose to the surface. She almost snapped at him then, and only the relief he'd given her with his potions kept her from telling him _exactly_ what she thought of _that_ demand.

"That's my decision, Severus, not yours."

"And I have no say in it whatsoever?!" he exclaimed, face turning ugly in anger. "My opinion matters _nothing_ to you?!"

"Does mine matter to _you_?" she shot back. "Do you even care that I don't want you joining You-Know-Who with those other sodding _friends_ of yours? At least I'm fighting for the right reasons! You're fighting for the supremacy of a group that you don't even belong to! You're not a Pure-blood any more than I am, and you know, you _know_ that they treat you differently because of it. You _know_."

"I earn my respect, Lily! I don't get things handed to me on a platter because I'm good-looking and popular and social!"

"You earn it by, what, teaching them nasty curses you came up with? You could use that mind to do _good_ , Sev, to help people! You're better in Potions than any of the seventh-years, never mind us fifth-years! You could make a difference, a _positive_ difference! But instead you spend your times with people who'll get out of here and become Death Eaters, and they'll try to oppress people like me, they'll go around convincing everyone that I'm worth less than you because my parents can't do magic. Do you think I'm less than you? Do you, Severus? Because if you don't, then how can you support those people? And if you do, why are you even friends with me at all?"

"Who's being naïve now?" he sneered, an ugly thing that made her blood boil. "You think everything is so black and white, Light versus Dark, good versus evil! It's not! We're _not_ all equal, not here and not in the Muggle world, not anywhere."

"But we _should_ be, Severus! That's the whole point! I can't change who my parents are, just like black people can't change the colour of their skin, and Jewish people can't change their heritage, and women can't change their gender! So why should we be judged by something that we were born with? You tell me, why, and I'll never bring up this again. You have my word."

"Because it makes us think differently. This is the wizarding world, not the Muggle one. You can't just come from one to the other and continue on as if there were no difference! Muggle-borns clamour for their rights, all the sodding time. The rights to what? To vote for the Minister for Magic? To get jobs in the Ministry? To come to Hogwarts? You have all those rights, Lily! Nobby Leach was the Muggle-born Minster for Magic, for Merlin's sake! Meanwhile you go around strutting as if you're ten times smarter than the magical folk for knowing how to drive cars and having electricity and watching telly. At least the Pure-bloods know to value my intellect! Muggle-borns only ever look at me and see something disgusting, because my hair gets greasy all the time and because I have a snake on my crest and because I'm interested in Dark Magic. You're the only Muggle-born who didn't, and even you've started doing it. So you tell me why I should think Muggle-borns equal to me, when they don't think _me_ equal to _them_!"

"I do! _I_ do! Aren't I enough?!"

"You're not the whole bloody wizarding world!"

In the wake of his bellow, the silence around them felt deafening. She stared at him, at his flushed cheeks, splotched with red, at his blazing black eyes and his angry expression, and she never felt more inadequate in her life.

"I'm not," she agreed, because what else was there to say? "I'm not, and I can't do anything about that. But if you need validation from the whole wizarding world, Severus, you'll be waiting a very, very long time, and even if you join that Pure-blood extremist, and if he burns the world to cinders, you'll still be waiting. That you don't see it is... is just bloody tragic."

"I'm not the only one seeking validation from the whole wizarding world," he answered softly, with such finality that Lily's throat tightened. It was like something was dying, inside her, between them, in his eyes, and Lily didn't have the strength to face it, to acknowledge it more than subconsciously.

"I don't want to be on different sides."

"Neither do I."

So she didn't – acknowledge it, that was – though perhaps she should have. Instead, she took the vials with the leftover potions and tucked them into her bag, biting her lip to hold back tears all the while. When she finally felt strong enough to face him again, she slipped the strap of her bag over her shoulder and turned back to look at him.

"You know where I stand on this."

"I guess I do."

"So, where do you?"

"I suppose that's the question."

It wasn't one that Lily had the fortitude to wait for, right now. She had a hunch she'd not be getting the answer she wanted, anyway, and in spite of everything, she wasn't ready for that, not yet.

She _wasn_ _'_ _t ready_. But it seemed more and more that life didn't care about that one little bit.

* * *

June drew ever closer, claiming the time and nerves of fifth-year students of Hogwarts. Severus kept his head down, both among the Slytherins and among the other students, wishing more and more fervently for the year to end. The professors were relentless in their assignments and their insistence on preparation for the O.W.L.s, and as the stress rose, so too did the conflicts. Even his usual excuse of studying with Stone was becoming suspect to Mulciber and Avery, and he did all in his power to steer clear of them, lest they figure out something more was going on.

Not many students noticed that he had a new wand, which was a blessing, because it would have been hard to explain it. Lily did, of course, but these days, he saw her more and more rarely, as she began studying with her Gryffindor girlfriends or Lupin, while Severus got dragged either into Mulciber's and Avery's group, or Stone's.

And as the end of the year drew near, so did Severus' anxiousness to finally master the Patronus Charm rise. It seemed that he'd reached some sort of plateau from which he couldn't move no matter how much he tried, and the anger that accompanied this burned through his insides, making it difficult to sleep and eat and sometimes even think.

Dumbledore noticed, of course; he made gentle, urging comments about Severus taking on too much, which only made him angrier until he began simply skipping sessions and blaming it on the O.W.L.s, because what the hell was the point anymore when he couldn't bloody create anything but that sodding mist, no matter how hard he tried?

On Friday one week before the start of O.W.L.s, Avery got him to join him, Mulciber, Philes and Thistletwaithe in one of the empty classrooms.

"Right, then," Mulciber said when they were all in and the door was closed. "I've got us a little fun planned to get the pressure of the O.W.L.s off. You up for it, boys?"

The Slytherins cheered in confirmation. Severus stayed silent, though he felt his gut beginning to churn; this was already looking to be the exact opposite of keeping his head down, and ever since that one time, he'd grown more and more uncomfortable with Mulciber's idea of 'a little fun'.

"Excellent. I've found out some pretty interesting things about several seventh-years that'll be just the thing."

"What's that, Mulce?" Philes asked.

"Turns out, they have a secret club, to recruit for Dumbledore."

"Rosier tell you, did he?" Thistletwaithe said, sniffing.

"Shut up, Zebadiah," Mulciber growled, only making the other boy snort in derision.

"You're too thick to've found anything like that out, Cain," he retorted, "and I'd like to know who's _actually_ getting this thing off the ground."

"It sure ain't him," Avery agreed with a knowing grin.

"Oh, zip it, you gasbag," Mulciber shot. "The last time _you_ had something smart to say, your mother hadn't even popped you out yet."

"Look who's talking."

"So, is this Rosier's idea or yours, then?" Philes asked, interrupting the two.

"Mine," Mulciber growled. "Rosier jus' gave me some information, is all. A suggestion, to make sure they know they're not poaching on the Dark Lord's turf."

"If you say so."

"Shut your trap, Terence, before I shut it for you. I'm in charge here."

"Not by popular vote, you aren't," Thistletwaithe pointed out.

Severus cleared his throat.

"Gentlemen, can we move this thing along? I have shit to be doing."

"Don't you always, these days, Snape?" Mulciber pointed out.

"Unlike you lot, I actually plan on passing my O.W.L.s and being useful once I get out of here," he said, glaring the log down; ever since he'd started spending time with Dumbledore, Severus had begun losing more and more patience with most of his friends, who (except for Thistletwaithe) seemed quite happy to neglect their intelligence for the sake of entertainment. "You can go bugger up your education all you like, but I'm not going to, so if that means I don't get to spend quality time with your ugly mugs, I'm quite fine with that. Now would you like me to tell you every single detail of how I spend my days, or can we get on with this?"

It started out very much like some of their usual raunchier pranks. Their target was a group of seventh-year Muggle-borns whom they found to be gathering in one of the disused classrooms that were open for study groups. Since most students had taken to spending their days outside – the summer was promising to be swelteringly hot this year – it was easy to go unnoticed, and to their advantage was the fact that this classroom had two entrances, one on each side. That meant that they could surround the group.

Severus hung back with Avery and Thistletwaithe, while Mulciber and Philes went on ahead to the farther entrance. Catching the four seventh-years off guard was ridiculously easy, all things considered; Severus, as one of the best casters when it came to more complex spells, was tasked with setting up the perimeter spells that were to make certain no one would notice them, while the other four played their little game on the seventh-years.

By the time he joined them in the room, there was a full-on duel between the two groups – the seventh-years had two years on them material-wise, but they were on the defensive, and the Slytherins were on the offensive, which, in this Slytherin lot's terms, meant Dark Magic. One of the boys was already on the ground – a Ravenclaw who was clutching his head and squealing like a wounded dog – while another stood protectively over him and fought to deflect Philes' and Avery's attacks with shield charms. Meanwhile, Thistletwaithe and Mulciber were engaged with the other two seventh-years, a girl that Severus vaguely remembered as someone Lily knew, and a boy who–

Oh, _hell_!

The darker-skinned boy that they were fighting was, to Severus' rising horror, Amir Shafiq of all people – this year's Head Boy. He was the furthest thing from a Muggle-born there existed, and someone who could get them all in a _lot_ of trouble, so what the _fuck_ had Mulciber been _thinking_?!

" _Stupefy_!" he yelled out, managing to catch Amir Shafiq in the back, which allowed the other two to subdue the girl with a Dark curse that burned the soles of one's feet. By that time, Philes and Avery had managed to knock down the last of the students, another Hufflepuff, with something that looked like it was a choking spell.

Gut twisting madly, Severus surveyed the carnage around him, eyes flying from the two Hufflepuffs and two Ravenclaws on the ground – Shafiq was out cold, but the other three weren't, and they were in obvious pain that made Severus a little ill to watch; the girl, curled into herself, squealing in a continuous, high pitched tone as her feet twitched in her shoes; the choking boy gurgling and gasping for breath; and the other one whimpering brokenly as he clutched his head – to the pleased and exhilarated looks on the faces of his fellow Slytherins, who seemed either completely immune to the sight or were still too high on adrenaline to register the results of their actions.

And not one of them seemed to see anything wrong with the picture, even ignoring that four eighteen-year-olds had been harmed. Was it possible that _none_ of them realised the deep shit they were in?

Pushing past the whaling tidal wave of horror, Severus turned his wand to the seventh-years and cast three Stunners in quick succession, until all that was ringing in the relative silence of his actions were his ears from the noises they'd been making, and he could _think_.

The bodies of the three seventh-years were still under the effects of their respective curses – and _fuck_ , what the _hell_ had they _used_?! – and were responding accordingly, the girl twitching, the Hufflepuff boy struggling for breath and the Ravenclaw boy still intermittently whimpering barely audibly, and the sight was in so many ways even more sickening than when they'd been conscious.

"Cancel those spells, _now_!" Severus hissed, turning to the rest of the sixteen-year-olds and very deliberately away from the group's victims, his voice like a cracked whip in the near-absolute silence of the room. His friends turned to stare at him, looking completely nonplussed by his actions, or, in Mulciber's case, just plain angry.

"What do you think you're doing, Snape, ordering us around?" he shot back.

" _I_?! What do _you_ think you're doing, you fucking idiot?! Do you know who that is?!" Thistletwaithe's eyes fell on Shafiq, and he paled instantly, but the others didn't seem to register the problem yet. "That's the resident Head Boy and a Pure-blood!"

Philes remained seemingly ignorant of the implications, and Avery looked like he was quite satisfied with the situation regardless. Their fearless leader, however, didn't look surprised in the least at Severus' proclamation, which could only have meant one thing – he'd _known_ whom they were targeting beforehand, and that meant that this was not what he'd said it was, this was more than just 'a little fun'.

"So?" Mulciber asked, crossing his arms over his chest. "It told you, they're recruiting for Dumblefucker."

"Shut up, you vacuous waste of mental space!" Thistletwaithe barked, for once acting like the Prefect that he was. "Philes, Terence, get those spells off of them," he ordered, himself turning to the girl on the ground. " _Ignes_ _Tinguo_!"

She stopped twitching immediately, and the next moment, the Hufflepuff's breathing eased, though it still produced a terrible rattle. The third boy's condition, however, appeared unchanged, and it wasn't hard to pick up on the fact that Philes had been the one to cast that particular curse.

"I don't know the counter-curse," he answered with a shrug.

"What did you even use?" Thistletwaithe asked, staring at him as if the pockmarked boy had grown another head.

" _Braegenpresse_."

Severus blinked, drawing a complete blank, which only made his panic ratchet up a notch. The other two curses weren't so horrible unless allowed to work for too long, but this looked like it was squeezing the boy's head somehow, and Severus certainly knew far better than any of the other four boys how dangerous such damage could be to a brain.

"What in the seven hells _is_ that?" he asked, having caught the way Thistletwaithe inhaled sharply, while the others looked as in the dark as Severus himself. _Braegenpresse_? What the fuck kind of old language was that, because it sure as shit wasn't Latin or Greek. Old English? Old High German? He'd never even _heard_ of that one, so how the fuck had _Boromir Philes_ known about it? "Where did you even h–"

" _Silencio_!"

Severus' wand was already pointed at Mulciber and was reaching for the spells he knew how to cast nonverbally by the time he figured out the bigger boy had cast the Silencing Charm on the seventh-years and not on Severus himself.

"This is _my_ plan, Snape, so you better stay out of it or–"

"Or what?!" Severus exploded, taking an aggressive step forward that almost had his wand planted under Mulciber's chin. His tongue saw fit to work properly for once and not get tied up by the anger pushing the words out; whether it was due to the fact that he held nothing but disgust for the other boys in this instance or that the severity of the situation was pushing him into controlled overdrive, but Severus didn't even have a smidge of focus left to be grateful for it, because his whole mind was devoted to furiously trying to get this sorted out, while at the same time trying to shut itself up on the chant that was rising like a tidal wave – _not yet, not yet, not yet, not ready for this, not ready, not yet_ – that was only making the panic even harder to contain. "Are you that stupid that you don't understand what you've gotten us into with you _fucking_ plan?! Or do you think _we_ _'_ _re_ too stupid to understand what all this is _really_ about?! These four are no _Mudbloods_ that you just conveniently happened to decide we should attack; Rosier would _never_ have simply told you about _this_ lot, Mulciber, not so that you could only have a little fun at their expense," he hissed at the bigger Slytherin. "This was a mission that he gave you, a mission you chose to tell us nothing about!"

By Mulciber's glare, he'd stumbled on the actual truth.

"He had us attack _the Head Boy_ , and you didn't think to tell us that?!" Philes exclaimed, finally grasping the seriousness of the situation. "You _fucking ingrate_! You should have told us what this was about!"

"I should have told you _nothing_!" Mulciber yelled back. "This was _my_ task, and _I_ say what's going on!" Enraged, he turned back towards Severus. "And you! You trying to sabotage me, are you? Or are you turning to the other side on us?!"

"Fuck you up your ugly _sodding_ arse, Mulciber!" Severus snarled. "Why would I fucking need to waste time on sabotaging you when you're too fucking stupid to even realise you've sabotaged yourself by not telling us anything?! This isn't hair loss or inside-out knees, this is heavy assault on the heir to one of the most respected Pure-blood families in Britain! This doesn't mean detention or suspension! If we get caught – and we _will_ – it's expulsion, or even Azkaban, you nimrod!"

Mulciber frowned, and Severus' mouth almost popped open at the sheer incomprehensible level of the other boy's ignorance.

"How is it that a Half-blood charity case knows more about the political positions of Pure-blood families than an heir to a Pure-blood family?" Thistletwaithe voiced what seemed to be the collective opinion, because even Philes was turning an ugly shade of greenish-yellow. "Hasn't your father taught you a single thing, or have you just been sitting on your ears this whole time?! What did you _think_ would happen when Khalid Shafiq, _who is a family friend with the former minister Jenkins_ , heard his son was attacked in this way?!"

Mulciber swung his head around to glare Thistletwaithe down full-on, clenching his fists menacingly. "Rosier instructed me–"

"To make us all liabilities to him?!" Severus spoke over him. "Because that's _exactly_ what you've made us, Mulciber! Cursing with spells Madam Pomfrey can reverse in her sleep is one thing; this is completely another! The Fire-Walking Curse burns can't be treated with _any_ magic! And who the hell knows what'll happen to that sod who got hit with a spell Philes has pulled out of who knows where, that maybe even _Dumbledore_ wouldn't know how to cancel!"

"And speaking of," Thistletwaithe picked up the thread, "what _did_ he instruct you to do in the first place? Because he sure as hell didn't want you attacking the Head Boy like any usual Mudblood in the corridor; what _precisely_ were we supposed to do?"

"He wanted detailed information," Avery volunteered, speaking for the first time since Severus had realised something was going wrong, making the greasy-haired Slytherin spin around violently to stare at him. It was almost a fright to Severus, that he'd forgotten about the smaller boy, especially because said boy looked inordinately calm, to the point where it bordered on smugness – as much a red flag as seeing Amir Shafiq was the target had been. "On who's already joined Dumbledore's group, what they know about the Dark Lord's recruitment in our house, and how they connect to ol' Bumbles' rumoured Burning Chicken Order that's gotten on the Dark Lord's radar recently."

"Which we can all still get," Mulciber growled. "Shafiq's only knocked out, and he's the leader anyway; he'll know all we need to find out. We've not failed anything."

"Except for being discrete," Avery finished the sentence. "Oh, and not getting caught, of course."

"You knew," Thistletwaithe said, voice a little thready. "You _knew_ the whole thing form the start, didn't you, Terence? What he was supposed to do, and what he was _going_ to do, and you told us _nothing_!"

Avery shrugged his shoulders. "Well, I _did_ give you some hints, if you'll remember, and if you're dumb enough to follow him in spite of it, I can't help you with that. But I'm sure you'll see the sense in supporting my assertion that he acted alone, in case we get caught. It's not like you care what happens to him any more than I do, and we're all Slytherins, after all; preservation of number one is our defining quality."

"You little fucker," Mulciber growled, whipping his wand towards Avery; by the time he'd done it, however, Avery had already hit him with a Full Body-Bind Curse, rolling his eyes all the while. The fact that he'd done so – Avery the squirt who'd been closest to Mulciber of them all – made Philes actually take a step back.

"I think that's quite enough of _you_ ," he told the Petrified Mulciber, who could only glare daggers at him. "Sorry to have dragged you into this, boys," he added with a smirk directed at the three of them. "But he was in my way, in more ways than one."

"What the fuck are you talking about, Avery?" Philes exclaimed, eyes wide. In response, Avery reached for the left sleeve of his robes and, with a quick tug, pulled them over his elbow, revealing a large tattoo of a skull with a snake coming out of its mouth – the Dark Mark was engraved on his forearm.

The one he must have gotten over the Easter holidays.

"What have you done, Avery?" Severus asked, horror making sweat bead on his forehead; this was just getting worse and worse. "And how the fuck did you get the Mark? You'll not be seventeen until September."

"Like my folks would go after the Dark Lord legally," he said with snort. "My old man volunteered me, and I've proven myself worthy. The only reason Mulciber here hasn't gotten his is that he's not earned it yet, and so when the opportunity presented itself – well, it was there for the taking, I couldn't just let it slip; he's not fucking up _my_ chance this time."

"So, let me get this straight," Thistletwaithe said, eyes flying from one to the other. "You _knew_ about the whole thing from the start, that we were to get information out of Shafiq without implicating ourselves, because this was some sort of initiation mission for Mulciber, and you _let him_ fuck it up, and bugger _us_ up in the process, so that you'd stick it to him that he's been treating you like his personal lapdog until now and stop him from getting the Dark Mark?"

"Give a clap for the brains here," Avery said. "Got it in one." After a beat, he added: "Well, mostly."

"You are mental," Philes breathed out.

Severus licked his lips, mind working feverishly to find a way out of this clusterfuck. He was firmly ignoring the part of himself that wanted to heave up all his lunch.

"Oh, don't be falling into fainting spells, lads," Avery told them almost cheerfully. "It'd be four words against one if we get caught, and Mulce here doesn't have much of a trustworthy air about him, does he?"

"Yeah; how would we even _get_ caught?" grabbing hold of the idea as if he was drowning – which he probably was, metaphorically – Philes demanded to know.

Not easily, if they cleaned the whole thing up properly, Severus found himself thinking, but the cramp in his stomach, the drumming heartbeat ringing in his ears and the sweat matting his hair to his neck were telling him a different story. It wasn't out of the question that the Auror Office would get involved with this, not with Khalid Shafiq's connections, and Severus had no illusions about playing cat-and-mouse with trained investigators. And what about the wrongness of their actions, the _evil_ –

And Terence fucking Avery had played them all, had put them all in danger to stick it to Mulciber, because he knew that he'd be the most protected of them all, because he'd been initiated into the Dark Lord's inner circle, at the age of sixteen. That initiation had to have been well earned, which meant that Rosier and his gang were going to make damn sure he got out clean, even if Severus, Philes and Thistletwaithe had to take the fall together with Mulciber.

Swallowing with difficulty, he clenched and unclenched his fingers around his wand, and locked eyes with Thistletwaithe, making a risky decision in a split second that he had before Philes had finished saying: "You put up repellent spells, Snape, didn't you?"

Then Severus turned to the reedy boy and exhaled forcibly through his nose.

"Fat load of good that'll do us when those curses you lot used will get us traced without problem," he spat out, voice nearly trembling with panic – _not yet, not yet, not ready for this yet, not yet, shut the_ fuck _up_ – but there was enough anger to make it convincing. " _Ignis Ambula_ , the Larynx-Crushing Curse, whatever the hell you saw fit you use, those aren't the Cruciatus, they don't stop working when you stop casting them!"

"Meaning?" Avery asked sharply, straightening from his casual slouch.

"Meaning your magical signature is traceable when they're active, or maybe even after they've been cancelled, and if you've forgotten, _you don_ _'_ _t know the counter-curse to the last one_!"

"What the hell are you talking about, Snape?" Philes demanded to know, voice almost an octave higher in panic.

"I've _never_ read anything of the sort," Avery agreed, looking conflicted between suspicion and fear.

"Of course you haven't," Thistletwaithe spoke up, and Severus nearly bit the inside of his cheek to hold himself in check – if he'd read the other boy wrong... "When have you ever cared for the mechanics of Dark Magic invention?" His voice was derisive, just on this side of terrified, and Severus _did_ bite his cheek to stop himself from exhaling in relief – he'd read the other boy right. Thistletwaithe was confirming his bullshit without blinking, and whether it was to rattle Avery or because he saw the deeper play Severus was making, it didn't much matter at the moment, so long as he wasn't calling it what it was – a hastily concocted lie. "Any more bright ideas, _Aves_? Because the only one who didn't cast any such spells at all was Snape, and he came in at the tail end, too, so the way I see it, he's the only one with a decent chance of getting out of this."

"Wrong," Avery answered. "This," he said, pointing to his marked forearm with his head, "means _I_ _'_ _m_ protected. I've proven my worth, they won't let me b–"

"You shut up, you fucking wanker," Philes snarled, grabbing Avery by the front of his robes and shoving him onto the ground, eyes so wide and bulging most of his whites were visible. "You are part of the reason we three are in this mess, and if you think you're getting out of this when we aren't, you've got another think coming, _mate_ , because I'll fuck you up so bad your mother won't recognise you."

Avery looked about ready for another round of exchanging curses, so Severus jumped in, taking control of the situation. "Philes, we don't have time for this," he barked, wand hovering in the air before him, his nerves taut with tension at the situation possibly escalating. In spite of the fact he felt like he was falling apart from the inside, Severus' hand was stone-cold steady, and so was his voice. "Avery, get your traitorous arse off the floor and go get Rosier, and if you even _think_ of abandoning us, I'll make _sure_ he knows _exactly_ what happened here, to the last detail."

"I bet the Dark Lord has little use for backstabbers like you," Thistletwaithe spat out derisively. "All it takes is letting the right people know, and if Snape doesn't know those people, you can bet that Philes and I do. We may have let you and Cain run the show, but we will _not_ be victims to your petty squabbles."

And finally, as his eyes shifted from Philes to Thistletwaithe to Severus and back again, Avery began losing his condescending smugness; it was so obvious he'd forgotten that their little group wasn't a case of the fearless leader, his trusty sidekick, and a bunch of followers, but rather a nest of rattlesnakes sharing space. Avery had turned on Mulciber, and that was fine by the rest of them, but he'd also lost the three of them instead of putting them into a place beneath himself because he'd thought they deserved it for letting Mulciber be the leader of their gang and that he could take over as soon as Mulciber had been removed. He'd severely misread the situation, accidentally or otherwise, and that meant he was alone among the other Slytherin fifth-years for the foreseeable future. And they still had two years to go.

Hands shaking slightly, he pushed himself to his feet and shouldered past them towards the door.

"Philes, go with him," Thistletwaithe ordered, only receiving a grim nod before the pockmarked boy skulked after and nearly pushed Avery to the ground with a shove, leaving Severus and Thistletwaithe alone with four unconscious seventh-years and Petrified Mulciber, who was glaring at them from the ground.

"What's the plan?" the blond boy asked immediately, which meant Thistletwaithe had decided to trust Severus' actions in a time of crisis and that this was why he'd confirmed the lie. It was something Seerus wasn't able to analyse right now in any way.

The plan, as it was, ended up being to have Rosier remove the curse – which Thistletwaithe informed him was an old Germanic one that put pressure on the brain – if he knew how, and Obliviate the hell out of all of them. The plan was also to make certain that only Mulciber and/or Avery went down for this, if it came to that.

In this, at least, Evan Rosier agreed. In the end, he too didn't know how to remove the curse, but he did Obliviate them, and helped clean up as best as possible. To say that the seventh-year Slytherin was pissed about the whole thing would have been the understatement of the year. The fact that he'd not thrown Mulciber to the wolves for this was a miracle in itself, and Severus would have gladly left Thistletwaithe to deal with this if he could have; unlike Avery, who still seemed to be pretending at being a Death Eater, Rosier was in a whole other league, something that was obvious from the second he stepped onto the scene. But he couldn't, because Thistletwaithe kept turning to him time and again throughout the gruelling ordeal of explaining what had happened, suffering Rosier's fury and skirting around the edges of the lie so as to keep everyone unsuspecting of it while letting Avery feel every pound of pressure inherent in the situation. And this meant that the eighteen-year-old Death Eater picked up within moments that Severus was the only one thinking clearly and remembered him well for it.

It felt like the noose around Severus' neck tightened considerably, and continued tightening throughout the clean-up.

They left the scene as quickly as they could, and Severus had no idea how he held it together until he could make certain that no one was following him, and he could get to Dumbledore's office. By then he was rattling apart at the seams, vomiting twice and almost crying the rest of the time, hidden in a disused bathroom in the dungeons. When he finally slipped into the Headmaster's office, he was met with a cold stare that made everything inside him freeze.

"Mr Snape."

He felt like a cornered animal, with the last safe place being taken away from it, like a misbehaving dog that sensed the wrath of its person bearing down on it, and he could almost see everything that he'd managed to painstakingly build in the last several months starting to crumble to dust before his feet.

"I'm sorry," came out before he'd even thought of a single thing to say. "I'm sorry – I didn't know – I'm sorry."

Dumbledore only lifted an eyebrow, and Severus bit his lip.

"It was some sort of recruitment mission for Mulciber, but he didn't tell us until after. He said – he said they were Mud– Muggle-borns, and I thought it would be just like any other time, just some – something usual for them. He had me put up wards – I wasn't there when they attacked, or I would have realised sooner – none of the others recognised the Head Boy. I – I don't even know what he was thinking, I don't–"

"Mr Shafiq is missing several days of his life. He was by far the luckiest of them. Miss Shanwick will not be able to walk for at least six weeks until her feet heal; Mr Fairlot will suffer the damage to his vocal cords for the rest of his life; and Mr Vemeer might not survive with his sanity intact, as I could not ascertain which curse was used on him, and breaking it by force has compounded damage to his brain and mind. They have all obviously been Obliviated. So, tell me, Mr Snape, what is it you think I should do in this situation?"

Severus keened, digging his fingers into his hair and pulling sharply, that panic he'd kept at bay finally overwhelming him completely. He'd not wanted this, none of it. It was supposed to be just like any other time, just a little messing about with Mudbloods that he could handle. This was not what he'd wanted, none of it, not now, not when he could just see the disappointment and disgust burning in Lily's eyes, when he could feel Dumbledore's approval slipping through his fingers like sand, when he'd not made his choice yet, _he_ _'_ _d not wanted this, he wasn_ _'_ _t ready, he couldn_ _'_ _t_ –

"Severus."

Head snapping up, Severus realised that Dumbledore was now standing in front of him, holding lightly to his wrists.

"I never wanted this," he whispered, eyes riveted to those knowing blue orbs behind half-moon glasses, feeling more desperate and lost than he ever had in his life. "I – I didn't – I'm not ready yet."

"I need you to tell me everything that happened, each detail. Do you understand me?"

So he did. He told Dumbledore everything, from the moment Avery had gotten him to join the gang earlier in the day to the moment Rosier had finished with Obliviating those four seventh-years, from what he'd thought it would initially be and how it would have been too suspicious to not join, to the realisation of what had actually happened and the fear he felt because of it. He left no detail out, not the spells used, not the looks Rosier had sent his way, not the lie he'd invented, and not the shift and conflict that had struck his group in consequence of Avery's actions; not one insignificant detail.

Done, he felt completely wrung out, mind cottony with fear and apprehension, and in the silence that followed, Dumbledore turned with his hands clasped behind his back to gaze at his sleeping Phoenix, deep in thought. Severus could only wait in his spot, trying to keep himself still and silent. The fear that Dumbledore would reject him after this was choking him, and he couldn't push it down like he could most of his other fears, because if he did, then what the fuck was Severus supposed to do? It would be the end of any possibility for him of choosing to fight for the Light, and even if he tried to stay neutral, he knew he wouldn't be able to accomplish it. Lily would leave him, she was half-way there already, and then he'd have nothing, _nothing_ , except maybe the possibility of Voldemort and his favour.

And after today, he wasn't sure he wanted that anymore, either. His ears were still ringing from the Ravenclaw boy's squeals, and the girl from that group hadn't looked much like Lily, but she was a Muggle-born, and Rosier had targeted her for a reason, and in two years, she might be Lily, being attacked by some other Death Eater wannabe, and he _couldn_ _'_ _t do it._

"Please, sir," he whispered, clenching and unclenching his hands. "I didn't mean to."

And oh, how he hated himself, from the bottom of his heart, with the kind of hatred that corroded everything inside until there was nothing left, for begging in this way, the way he'd sworn he never would again, not after Tobias had called him those things and beat him and tried to throw him out of the house two years ago. But he couldn't help himself, because he'd allowed this, what he had in these sessions with Dumbledore, to become the thread he clung to, because he'd allowed himself to become deluded by Dumbledore's praise and pride, by the thought that this was his chance to keep Lily, by the idea of a _choice_. What a joke. As if Severus Snape had ever had any choice in the matter.

Dumbledore sighed and turned his head to look at Severus.

"The wards that you raised prevented any of the portraits from witnessing anything, in addition to other students or faculty. The Obliviation was expertly done; I could recover no memories from them. As it stands, your testimony is the only concrete evidence that I have against Misters Mulciber, Avery, Philes and Thistletwaithe. Are you willing to stand behind what you have told me, Mr Snape?"

Swallowing past his dry throat, Severus stared at the Headmaster as the full scope of the situation finally properly dawned on him. A part of him had believed his own words, had believed that they _would_ be discovered in some way, that someone would have seen something, or there really was a way of distinguishing unique characteristics of the caster's magic in the curses, or _something_. But that wasn't the case, and everything concrete that Dumbledore had was coming from him; without his testimony as to the events of the day, Mulciber and the rest would go free, unpunished for harming four students to the point where they might suffer life-long consequences, students that weren't Gryffindors and weren't the Marauders, students whose main act was to be Muggle-born (and not even all of them at that) and side against the Dark Lord; but, if he were to stand by his words and implicate them, he would be putting himself in direct path of Rosier and through him, Voldemort himself, would be marked for a traitor and a Dumbledore supporter.

It was the moment of choice, right now, and he was frozen in indecision, because even though Dumbledore's words from so long ago kept ringing out in his head, asking him if he was a murderer, if he could carry the fate of either of these two groups of people on his shoulders, if he could expose himself like this, if he could–

He couldn't do it. He couldn't _fucking_ do it.

Sweat was breaking out on his forehead, and his fingers were cold as ice; no doubt there was no blood left in his face, and who even knew how wide his eyes were, either, or how shallow his breathing was. Yet Dumbledore stayed utterly silent, staring at him with those burning blue eyes that would not let him off the hook, that were pinning him down and waiting for the answer, one way or another.

"You said –" he breathed out, licking his lips. "You said I'd have time."

"A reprieve, Mr Snape, but you and I both knew that the moment of choice was unavoidable."

 _I_ _'_ _m not ready._

"Please. _Please_."

Dumbledore's face closed off, and before his very eyes, Severus saw all connection between them breaking.

"I'm not a Gryffindor," he said, fairly vibrating from the effort it took to stand still and not jump to grab hold of Dumbledore's robes. "I can't – can't make myself give my life for theirs – I _can_ _'_ _t_. I won't get – two more years – if I do this on the record, they'll tear me apart! _Please_."

"Do you believe that I would not protect you?"

"You can't!" he spat out, tears leaking out of his eyes from sheer desperation he was feeling. "Don't you get it? Slytherins stand together and they don't tolerate weakness, and your reach does not extend that far, you _can_ _'_ _t_ –"

"This is my school, Mr Snape."

"But it's not your House! All you have is Slughorn, and – Rosier and Malfoy and the Blacks and all the rest – they have the upper-years – plenty of lower-years, too!"

"Do I not have you, as well?"

"You _promised me_! You promised me you wouldn't pressure me – promised me I'd get to figure it out on my own!"

Dumbledore's raised hand stopped Severus' outburst, though he couldn't quieten his breathing, too.

"Very well. Today is Friday. Tomorrow, you and I will have our last session. On Monday morning, I expect your answers, regarding the attack on Misters Shafiq, Fairlot, Vemeer and Miss Shanwick, and your chosen side in this war. That is all I can give you, Mr Snape, and I believe it is quite generous."

That wasn't something Severus felt able to judge, because it _all_ felt unfair and ungenerous to him in this moment, so instead he simply nodded and fled the man's office, feeling out of his mind with the panic and sheer terror of the days to come.

* * *

 **A/N:** I suppose the alternative title to this chapter could be 'Not Ready Yet', but that'd be out of order with the other chapter titles, and I have peculiar tastes about things being symmetrical and orderly in certain instances.


	11. Ch I,9: The Crystallisation of Clarity

**Chapter 9: The Crystallisation of Clarity**

Severus spent the night tossing and turning while the others slept the sleep of those who had the hope that they'd gotten away with their deeds. The impossibility of his situation kept tumbling through his aching head, thoughts chasing each other in endless, useless loops, because there was nothing left for him to know about this, nothing to help tip the scales one way or another, nothing to help him choose. His stomach wouldn't stop churning, and every time he closed his eyes, he could see those four seventh-years on the ground, while the Slytherins stood above them, and the images made him want to scrub himself raw from the inside, to scream in helplessness, made him want to shrivel up and disappear, because what was his own life against these sorts of actions?

And yet, what wasn't it, either, but his very life?

Try as he might, the decision was no clearer for the hours he spent tossing it and turning it around, for the seemingly endless night that offered no respite from the battle between self-preservation and the last miniscule chance of something better that was obscured by doubts and fears.

Sometime in the early hours of the morning, he snuck out, completely exhausted and feeling ill, and wandered to the courtyard entrance that led to the boatshed, where he knew no one but Hagrid usually ventured. He sat down on the stone steps and stared into the rising sun, trying to make up his mind on what to do, because today was his last chance to create a Patronus, and he felt like death warmed over, devoid of any possible happiness or joy, weighed down by the tormenting doubts and fears.

It was here that he finally managed to doze off, hunched in on himself in his tatty pyjamas and the old set of robes that were too small for him, resting his aching head against the stone of the castle and basked in the golden rays of the early morning sun. It was a light sleep, the kind that came about when one became too tired to even worry, and it was more a construct of wandering thoughts and hallucinations than it was a dream, but he saw Lily as she'd been the summer before their third year, the one time they'd gone to Manchester together, just the two of them, back when Petunia had still wanted to cover for her sister and lie to their parents that she'd come with them on the bus. Lily had worn a fluttery yellow sundress with spaghetti straps and pink flats, and her hair had been braided away from her face and let to fall down her back, and when she'd gotten him to chase her through the park, her eyes had sparkled like emeralds and her cheeks had been ruddy and her lips plump from delight, and though he'd hated having to run after her that day, had felt hot and sweaty and his hair had stuck to his cheeks from the moisture in the air, he could remember nothing but elation at the sight of her, the most beautiful thing his thirteen-year-old eyes had ever seen, at the thought that she had chosen _him_ of all people as her best friend, that it had made him the luckiest wizard in the world.

It was the day he'd fallen irrevocably, unstoppably, inconsolably in love with her.

"Severus," Dumbledore's voice pulled him out of his doze, and he clenched his eyes shut against the sun. He still felt completely exhausted, and even lifting his head took effort, with his temples pounding and his vision swimming. Still, he got to his feet and ran his fingers through his hair, more to push away the fatigue than to try and make himself a little presentable; he probably looked as horrid as he felt with or without his hair in disarray, and what had looks ever meant to him anyway? "Do you have your wand with you?"

"Yes, sir," he whispered, stuffing his hand in the pocket of his outer robes to check.

"Come; let us begin, then."

"But, my clothes..."

"I will have a house-elf bring you something to change into before you leave the office."

They reached his office in silence, Severus always a step or two behind the Headmaster, and the glass wall between them never felt more real than in this moment, because this was it, this was the end, one way or another.

Dumbledore summoned tea for them both, and some dry toast, which was probably the only thing Severus' upset stomach could even handle. He picked at it without enthusiasm, his head strangely cottony after the night of torrent, like the first moments after a storm passed, when everything was still and quiet as the grave.

"Do you have your memory?" Dumbledore asked, and, blinking, Severus pulled out of his stupor to look at the man, this unreachable, untouchable figure that was the Leader of Light, the Hogwarts Headmaster, the most powerful man in Wizarding Europe and maybe even the world.

"Yes, sir."

"Very well, then. When you are ready."

Pushing the plate away, Severus got to his feet and pulled out his ebony wand out of his robes, the handle warm and slippery in his clammy fingers. Licking his lips, he lifted it up in front of him until he could see the tip, arm heavy as lead, and he brought up the dream, the memory, of Lily in that moment when he'd fallen in love with her, this one final time.

" _Expecto Patronum_!"

The silvery liquid of the spell burst out and coalesced into a solid shape of a large animal right before his eyes, and all his anxiety and fear escaped him in one disbelieving exhale as his exhausted mind registered that he'd done it, _he_ _'_ _d actually done it_ , after months of failure and frustration, he'd managed to conjure a corporeal Patronus, and though in any other moment he would have been disappointed, embarrassed, humiliated, right now all he could feel was relief and elation as he took the beautiful animal in.

Big-eyed, big-eared, genteel-looking. Female.

A doe. His Patronus was a doe.

When he managed to tear his eyes away, he found the Headmaster observing it with strange thoughtfulness, and for the first time since he'd realised what Mulciber had truly gotten them into yesterday, there was none of that distance that had risen up between them; Dumbledore was no longer the Leader of Light, nor the Hogwarts Headmaster, but was once again his mentor on this journey of self-understanding he'd undertaken, and Severus felt so relieved his legs were turning to jelly so quickly he fairly crumpled into the chair he'd vacated moments before, heart beating wildly in his chest.

The doe inspected her surroundings, searching for any threat, and after finding none, she turned to Severus to nudge his cheek with her not-quite-solid snout, and where his skin touched her, warmth suffused him, bringing forth that memory of Lily he'd used, her smiling green eyes and her gorgeous red hair, her cheeks dusted with a blush and her lips drawn in a smile, and the rightness of it all made him lift his fingers to cup the Patronus' head and hold it close as delicately as he could, fearing any pressure that might break her.

"Some people possess a Patronus of one shape for most of their lives, before experiencing its transformation into another form."

"Why?"

 _Why is she here? Why did I do it this time? Why are you telling me this?_

"Those who experience deep, true love for another, their Patronus takes the shape of their loved one's."

Severus didn't dare look at the old, wizened wizard; instead, he closed his eyes and held tightly to the memory of Lily and the love that she brought out in him, knowing deep within his very soul that this wasn't his Patronus, that this was hers, that in spite of everything, she was here with him and would always be, that no matter what happened, he'd never lose her completely.

"I'm scared," he admitted to the beautiful creature, opening his eyes to meet her silvery ones, to watch her dim as he released his desperate hold of the memory that had created her. "I'm so scared."

Dumbledore's wrinkled hand found its way to his shoulder, and the old wizards squeezed it gently as the doe faded away into nothingness.

The choice he'd spent so much of his time dwelling on, the choice that had occupied his thoughts and kept him up at night, the choice that even just half an hour ago, he'd felt so torn about – suddenly it didn't seem nearly so unsolvable. In fact, it didn't feel like a choice at all, anymore. It felt like inevitability.

"You are doing the right thing, Severus."

"What if it's not enough?"

"You are doing the right thing _for yourself_. Whether Miss Evans accepts it or not, whether it changes her mind or not, you will have done this for your own good. It is better to know love, even fleetingly, than to walk through life having never felt its touch. And those who allow it to shape them, they are the luckiest of all."

"Is this just another of your proverbs, sir?"

"No," the Headmaster said, an immeasurable, insurmountable emotion held in the one word. Severus looked at him, and Dumbledore didn't even try to hide the emotion in his eyes, in his soul, though Severus couldn't but avert his gaze at the naked truth written all over the old wizard's face; a painful truth, Severus thought. "No, I am telling you from personal experience. Trust me on this, my boy. The truly strong are the ones who can live this truth, and you are stronger even than I for it."

He released a shaky breath and closed his eyes in resignation. Like it or not, his path was now set, and all he could do was tread it.

"All right. All right, I'll help you in this war however I can. For Lily. Always for Lily."

* * *

Dumbledore gave Severus some time to gather himself and find his inner centre, to find a way of taming down his terror at the thought of what life was going to be like come Monday, when the Slytherins would know he'd betrayed them to the Headmaster.

"What will happen to me now?" he asked the man, hands shaking in his lap.

"You will stay in my guest bedroom and rest properly, and when you have slept and eaten something, you will go back to your studies and focus on passing your O.W.L.s."

"But..."

Dumbledore inclined his head and offered him a gentle smile that did nothing to calm Severus down.

"As for your dormmates, unless proper authorities become involved or some other evidence surfaces, they will be allowed to finish out the year in the conviction that they have gotten away with their attack on Mr Shafiq, Mr Fairlot, Mr Vemeer and Miss Shanwick."

"I–" Severus' voice deserted him, as he stared, open-mouthed, at the Headmaster.

"Severus, while these students deserve justice for what was done to them, far more is at stake, and revealing your collaboration with me would be not only short-sighted and dangerous, but also useless in the long run. Make no mistake, I will make certain that your fellow Slytherins cannot harm anyone again, but I will not do it in any way that will endanger you."

"Would you've... if I'd agreed yesterday, would you've still..."

"Dark times are ahead of us, Severus, and we must prepare for them. To do so, sacrifices will need to be made. This is one such case."

"It was a test," he breathed out, finally understanding. "It was a test."

"I am afraid that both your hand and mine were forced in this," Dumbledore answered gravely. "I did not want to use such unsavoury methods to push you on this point, but I felt I had been left no choice by your fellow Slytherins."

Anger and hurt and disgust rose up like bile in the back of his throat, and Severus inhaled shallowly in an attempt to keep himself still. He'd not seen it, how had he not seen it, how was it possible that a Slytherin such as him had not thought to expect this sort of manipulation, this sort of betrayal–

The world swam before his eyes, and he shut them tightly, pushing everything down. No matter what he felt on the subject, Dumbledore's assertion held truth to it – he'd taken his sweet time to reach this point, more than he'd ever thought he might get, and not even Dumbledore's patience was infinite. Severus' emotions were clamouring inside his skull, demanding that he jump up and tell the Headmaster to go to hell, but his body, too exhausted by the stress and the sleepless night, too drained by the demanding magic he'd just performed, refused to move, cast a blanket of lethargy over his very thought processes, until everything he was feeling seemed like it didn't quite matter all that much.

Perhaps if he hadn't felt as if every last scrap of energy had been leached out of him, Severus really would have said 'sod it' and stormed off to stew in all the negativity that was suddenly making him doubt every single meeting, every single exchanged word, every single taught lesson. Perhaps it would have even provided him some relief from the pain twisting his insides. It didn't matter – the outcome would have been the same either way, because even if he had done that, in the end he would have come back, one way or another, because he'd _made_ the decision, and that was what truly offered relief, relief that was, in spite of the choler Dumbledore's trickery had stirred in him, bolstered by the fact that _he was going to be safe after all_.

Coming to a decision felt like he'd reached some sort of finish line, some resting place, and all he wanted to do was _stop_. For all that just an hour ago, he'd felt like he'd never be able to decide either way, now that he was here, that he was committed to the side he'd picked, to Lily and Albus Dumbledore and the Light, it felt as if it had been inevitable from the moment he'd accepted the offer to learn the Patronus Charm, that it had all been just about facing the facts, and the facts were that for Lily, he'd do _anything_ , even turn away from what he'd thought he wanted for his future and towards what he she'd told him she'd already chosen, no matter what he believed in.

Because his views on their society, on the political situation, his opinion on Muggles and Muggle-borns, none of those had changed with this decision he'd made. Choosing Lily over Voldemort had never been about that, not really, not at its core, no matter how much politics and opinions had always been entwined in the choice he'd had before him. His silver doe of a Patronus had made the choice for him, and he knew he'd stand by it in spite of Dumbledore's manipulation, stand by it in spite of the uncertain future.

His innermost self was telling him that this was the right choice. Severus wasn't able to say why, and his logical side rebelled at the confusion, stirring doubts that fed off of what Dumbledore had done to him; it was just not strong enough to overpower that sense of rightness, not in his exhausted state.

So he simply let it go, for once in his life. Considering the magnitude of the choice he'd made, it was better to put his limited reserves of energy towards determining the immediate course of action. Deciding what Dumbledore's manipulation meant for him could wait until he had gotten a chance to determine what it had meant to the Headmaster himself.

"What do you need of me then, sir?" he asked Dumbledore instead, when he felt like he could speak again. It earned him what seemed like an approving look, though he refused to delve into it, or question how it made him feel to be looked at like that by the man in front of him, with everything that had passed between them in the last three plus months.

"Information on any fellow classmates and housemates that have turned to Lord Voldemort. We can begin with a list of those you know to have taken the Mark."

And so they went through every scrap of information he knew on the subject, every secret meeting and every branded arm, every whispered plan for the future and every point of danger.

Severus found himself yawning by the time he was done; just hours ago, he'd felt like he would never be able to sleep again.

"You should rest," Dumbledore said, rising from his chair and indicating that Severus should follow him. "We will continue our meetings until the end of the year; there is a Mind Art that I believe would be beneficial for you to learn."

"Occlumency," Severus guessed.

"Yes, that is correct." Reaching for a patch of wall next to a dark tapestry, Dumbledore revealed a narrow staircase that Severus had never noticed before. "You have a natural tendency towards it, which will aid us greatly, but learning it properly will be essential in the coming times, as it will help you remain balanced even in situations of high stress. Moreover, if you are to become an active spy amongst Voldmort's supporters, you must be able to protect your mind and your allegiance from them." On top turned out to be his private quarters, a sizeable-looking flat with a sitting room and a kitchen, as well as bathroom and several rooms. Dumbledore led him to one of them. "You may use this room to rest; your clothes will be delivered to you here. And, when you are ready, there are several books on the topic of the Mind Arts that I believe you will find beneficial."

"Thank you, sir," Severus said, stepping towards the beckoning bed.

"You're quite welcome, my boy," the old wizard answered, eyes showing what felt like immeasurable warmth as he smiled softly at the teen.

* * *

"I've got an excellent idea," Sirius declared on Saturday after breakfast in a cheerful voice. Frowning, Remus looked up from his sketchbook and that damned section of the castle that was still giving him trouble after all this time, mildly curious to see what it was that his friend had gotten into his head now.

He'd grown more and more hyperactive in the last few weeks, and Remus had started feeling an odd sense of déjà vu in response; there was something about Sirius at the end of the school year that always promised danger, but it had never been this pronounced. Going home was not a fun experience for him, that much Remus knew quite well; Sirius' parents seemed to Remus sometimes near-homicidal, given the nerve damage and relief with which Sirius returned to Hogwarts each year.

Still, usually James didn't invite Sirius to visit him quite this often, or this desperately. Remus wasn't one for prying into Sirius' affairs, and no doubt James understood far more than the two Half-bloods in the group could, what with old families led by tradition and whatnot, but even he was getting worried.

Especially with the way his friends were starting to make him uncomfortable in their everyday actions. Like the pranks they all loved to pull – they felt a little more targeted against the group of Slytherins that were Death Eater wannabes, and Remus saw no cause to say anything, because generally speaking, those upper-years had no compunction about targeting Gryffindors, so it really was just tit for tat, wasn't it, but the tone of it had become... spiteful, for some reason.

It was just a pesky feeling Remus could easily push to the side, though, whenever Sirius had this sort of delighted grin on his face, or James offered lazy, indulgent expressions, or Peter's eyes glinted with the excitement of a new activity they could all do together.

"Let's hear it, then," James said.

"Well, we've all been working on the Map for ages now, yeah? But we've only ever focused on the castle inside, not the grounds. On the other hand, we spend at least one night every month roaming about the Forbidden Forest without any kind of order. _So_ , my idea is that this time, we actually sit down and plan out where we'll go for the next full moon, and maybe get the ball rolling on the grounds part of the Map in the process."

"Plan out?" Remus asked, frowning slightly. "As in, you'll herd the wolf to that area and snoop about between making certain I don't end up destroying the greenhouses? I'd rather not."

James snorted. "Please, Remus; controlling the wolf isn't nearly as difficult as you seem to think it is."

"That's because we've kept away from human-populated areas," Remus reminded him. "Or don't you remember those almost run-ins we had the last two months? If I remember correctly, you barely hid those scratches on your ribcage from your Quidditch teammates, and Wormtail had to steal anti-infection potions from the hospital wing for Sirius to not get rabies from the bites or something."

"We've told you, Moony, those weren't your fault," Sirius reminded him, his words making Remus warm, though the guilt still gnawed at him. The werewolf could be supremely vicious when it was on the scent of human flesh, as his friends had gotten a chance to figure out for themselves in the last two months.

"Yeah, Remus," Peter was quick to agree. "Prongs and Padfoot knew what they were doing last month far better than those first two times; you barely even broke their skin."

"As I've said; not nearly as difficult as you think," James repeated with a nod that seemed to indicate he'd put the matter to rest. "We'll be fine, like we always are. You know it does you good to get out of that stuffy old building, and, honestly, you have no idea how annoying it is to have antlers constantly hitting the ceiling and tangling in doorways."

"Prongs is right, Moony; you're basically a very exuberant puppy when we're out and about."

"That's still a far cry from roaming the Hogwarts _grounds_ the whole night," Remus persisted. "Don't lie to me; I remember that first time you got me to agree to get out of the Shack back in January. Vaguely, to be fair," he felt compelled to add, "but I'm pretty sure Prongs had to head-butt me to get the wolf away from going up to the castle. I had aches and bruises from his antlers for _days_. It was only luck that I usually do even worse damage to myself, otherwise I've no clue how I'd have explained it to Madam Pomfrey."

"You're one big killjoy, you know that, Moony?" James asked, making Remus grimace.

"I'm just trying to make sure we're not being stupid. I don't like the idea of hurting you, even just in play."

"That's a little unavoidable, mate," James said with a slight wince. "But it's nothing we can't handle."

Remus' resolve crumbled a little at their eager, pleading looks, and he sighed.

"Well... if you really want to plan it out, then all right, but maybe just not castle grounds this time? It's the last full moon before the summer hols, and I'd... I'd really like it if what memories I end up recalling from it don't include me trying to harm you."

"We could go see if there's any hidden caves around Hogsmeade?" Peter suggested earnestly. "I heard from, er, Morris and Doubley that there's trolls and hags and all sorts in those caves."

James snorted, and Sirius laughed outright; even Remus fought hard not to snigger.

"There are no trolls and hags around here, Wormtail," James said with a shake of his head. "They were pulling your leg, mate. Really, hags!"

"Oh, Wormtail," Sirius said, wiping his eyes with the palms of his hands, "the things you'd fall for."

Peter, red in the face, offered a somewhat sour smile, most likely feeling embarrassed as he usually did for being tricked so easily, and Remus patted his shoulder.

"It's still a good idea, Peter, to look for caves. Those can come in handy."

"What for? When we're running from Death Eaters and have to lay low?"

"More like, if we ever have to get Aurors off our trail!"

"Why would you even have Aurors after you, Padfoot?" Remus asked him, shaking his head. Really; if Sirius could always be trusted to do anything, it was to come up with the wildest ideas.

"Well, for endangering the Statute of Secrecy, of course! When I get that flying bike all set up."

"Which will be just as soon as you move out of that ugly house," James pointed out.

"Have at least two more years before that, don't I, Prongs?" Sirius asked, mood immediately souring at the reminder of what was waiting for him in less than a month.

"I keep telling you – we'll be seventeen next year. We can get a flatshare, or even ask my folks to use the guest house on our property. Be like proper Muggle uni students and whatnot."

"Let's not let my crazy family ruin a perfectly good morning, yeah?"

It was, Remus suspected, more the brittleness in Sirius' voice than the actual words that cinched it for James. Not that it mattered much either way, because they quickly rounded back to the topic of planning their next outing, which would be falling right on the tail-end of the O.W.L.s, the Saturday after they were done. That had been a lucky break, even though Remus was worried about Herbology, their last exam of the bunch. His concentration was always shot in the two days preceding the full moon, but at least this month he'd gotten the best possible full moon scenario he could imagine – full waxing of the moon was an hour after sunrise on Saturday, meaning the Saturday evening transformation was going to be by far the easiest one of 1976 – so he held out hope that he'd manage to pass the exam on that Friday.

"It'll be the best one yet," James decided after consulting the lunar map they made regularly for Astronomy. "It'd be a shame to waste it on caves."

"Come on, Remus, what do you say?" Sirius wheedled. "Nobody's going to be down by the Quidditch pitch in the middle of the night, it's right by the forest edge, and it's really almost as far away from the castle as you can get and still be on Hogwarts grounds."

Well, all things considered, the wolf was bound to be far more manageable on that full moon than on any other in the foreseeable future, and though Remus felt a sharp tang of disquiet at the thought of roaming the castle grounds, he could convince himself with little effort that it was better to do it now, when everything was falling together so favourably for once, than to leave it for winter, when the nights were far longer and thus both provided more opportunity for escape and were more taxing for his friends. Besides, he didn't want to let his friends down, not when they'd been there for him since October, every single full moon. And it wasn't like they'd not come close to those sections of the school's grounds before, and nothing much had happened after that first time.

Who knew, perhaps this time Remus could even have, if not enjoyable, then at least not manic memories the following day. He wasn't quite prepared to go as far as to call it 'fun' yet, not nearly, but... not as unpleasant as they'd been in the last four years, or even those first three times when they'd all stayed in the Shrieking Shack and ended up fuelling more gossip in Hogsmeade about it than Remus had managed by himself in four years.

"Well... all right."

"Yes!" James and Sirius crowed together, and Remus smiled.

A little discomfort was worth this, surely. And nothing ever happened, anyway, so it was going to be just fine.

* * *

Severus thought he'd have trouble falling asleep, but the opposite was true. It wasn't a particularly restful sleep, granted, but it was far more than he'd managed to get last night, the type without dreams, that left one feeling unable to open their eyes and lift their head after waking.

His clothes were, as promised, on a chair in the corner of the room, and Severus, hoping it wasn't too much presumption, decided to avail himself of the bathroom shower. Really, he needed the pounding of water in his face and over his back to get himself back to better thinking order. His head felt cottony and his thoughts were slow, thick, and he _hated_ it.

In the end, he ended up sitting on the floor of the shower, curled up as tightly as he could, black strands of hair sticking to his cheeks and neck, while his mind tried to come to terms with what had happened that morning. That sense of rightness he'd felt remained, and it, more than even the protection Dumbledore offered, was what kept regret at bay. Second-guessing things after the fact had only ever brought him stress when he indulged in it, and in this particular instance, he felt instinctively that it would be far more detrimental than even the process of deciding had been, so he firmly pulled his mind away from that direction.

That didn't help the whaling pit of apprehension in his gut, though; neither his decision nor Dumbledore's promise of silence on the matter of yesterday's incident negated the worries that had clogged his throat yesterday and made him disappoint the Headmaster so horribly. The fact was that he still had those two years left at Hogwarts, two years in which he'd have to share the dorm with Mulciber, Avery, Philes and Thistletwaithe, two years in which Rosier, with his sudden keen interest in Severus, would be sending his Slytherins to circle him, two years of having to fall deeper and deeper into that circle, because that was what being a spy would mean, two years of lying to L–

He had to tell Lily. He'd done this for _her_ , he'd done it for himself for her, it was about choosing sides before the choice got taken away from him, but spywork was secretive and sensitive and dangerous, and Lily was the epitome of Gryffindor brashness, so how could he ever get Dumbledore to let him tell her, how, when even he himself wasn't sure he could trust her with the information that could lead to him ending up like those Muggles and Muggle-borns who'd been vanishing from the face of the earth for years?

And the very idea that his mind had gone to _asking Dumbledore_ whether to tell Lily or not was abhorrent to him, but there was nothing he could do about it, because whether he liked it or not, he'd given the old wizard a say in it the moment he'd agreed to the arrangement, had bound himself to this great figure, and as much as it felt like finally finding one person, just one single adult in the whole world who gave a tiny little sod for him, it also felt like a noose, a leash around his neck, because he wouldn't be free, would he, not when he was probably Dumbledore's best chance at putting his own man on the inside, and he had two more years of Hogwarts, but what about when he got out, when it was the real world and the stakes became higher, when Dumbledore demanded of him to take the M–

His mind shut down before the thought formed completely, retreating to a corner that was safe, protected by the warmth and beauty of a silver-skinned doe, and Severus scrambled out of the shower, leaving puddles and wet footprints on the tiles as he groped for his sleek black wand among his clothes, barely stopping himself from clutching the handle too tightly as he dug for one happy memory, any happy memory, and came up only with the need to reaffirm his earlier certainty and with the conviction that he _could_ conjure his Patronus, he'd done it already, beautifully. How could that ever be enough?

But it was all he had, and so he tried anyway.

" _Expecto Patronum_."

The silvery substance of the charm burst out, and for one wild moment he was terrified it would stay in its formless state, but no, a second longer and it coalesced into his doe. She nuzzled against his cheek, tongue darting out to lick it, feeling like what Severus imagined moonlight would feel if it were solid, tingly and silky and syrupy, and he let his very soul bask in the safety she radiated.

He'd read up on the Patronuses more than he'd ever thought he would, but nowhere had it said that you could touch them, or that they'd touch you first, and it felt like being privy to the world's most guarded secret, sacred and fulfilling.

His breath calming, he let his Patronus dissipate as the strength of his previous conviction reasserted itself. This was the only way that allowed him to at least have a chance of keeping Lily, and Severus didn't go back on his word. Besides, whatever he may need to do in the future, even if Dumbledore had truly been playing him all this time, he'd still get to learn from Albus bloody Dumbledore of all people, the most powerful wizard in Britain and probably the continent.

But it would be better to wait until the holidays to tell Lily. He wanted to think that she'd react positively to this, that she'd understand why he'd done it and what he'd meant by it, but with the way they'd been going lately, he didn't feel confident enough in his knowledge of her. Lily was brash, and she was as like to hug him as she was to stomp up to the Headmaster and start screaming at him again, and Severus couldn't afford another outburst like that, couldn't afford to have the Slytherins noticing their friendship more than they already were, couldn't afford Dumbledore being upset with him, couldn't afford the stress of it all now that the O.W.L.s were only days away.

Four weeks weren't going to make a difference, he decided. And once they were away from Hogwarts and the House rivalry and her people and his people, when it was again just the two of them, then he'd figure out a proper way of telling her, so that she'd never again question his devotion to her and their friendship.

And until then, there were plenty of other things to focus on; for once, Severus felt himself far too preoccupied and busy to worry much about Lily pulling away from him.

* * *

Returning to the Slytherin Quarters that afternoon was one of the most nerve-racking things Severus had ever done, and he'd lived through plenty of such things in his short life. Dumbledore had given him some pointers about mental shields and ordering his mind, but it all felt like no protection at all from the sensation that every look directed his way was knowing, and every word spoken to him was laced with double meaning, and every single thing he did was giving him away.

Paranoia was a bugger, and Severus had not been unfamiliar with it before today, so he'd half-way expected to be feeling it. At least his friends – and could he even call them as such, when he was spying on them? – were far more subdued today than they'd been yesterday evening. Mulciber was mainly preoccupied with sending hateful looks Avery's way, while the smaller boy remained the only one whose spirits seemed high. Philes looked like he was putting as much of his effort into revision as he could humanly summon, and Thistletwaithe appeared unnerved, though immediately turned to watch Severus walk through their dorm room.

"Where've you _been_ all day?" he hissed, leaning back in his chair as soon as Severus had dropped down on his bed. His work desk was immediately to the left of Severus' bed, which consequently put him close enough that the others, who were on the other side of the dorm, couldn't hear his words. Severus' heart jumped into his throat at the thought that not even one day in, someone had already noticed something was going on, but then common sense pushed forward, helped by the half-way panicked look in Thistletwaithe's eyes, and he reminded himself that he'd been going off on his own for months now and had managed to keep the true reason for it secret from them all along; this was no different.

"What do you think?" he snapped at the blond instead, rolling his eyes. "I've been brewing. I had to get away from those two," he added with a scowl, pointing with his head lightly towards Mulciber and Avery.

"I looked for you in all your usual haunts, Snape, and you _weren't there_."

Fuck.

"And did you think to look in the private laboratories?" he asked snidely to cover his nerves.

"Since when do you have access?" But then the boy seemed to come to his own conclusion, because he narrowed his eyes sharply. "It's your Gryffindor Mudblood who has access, isn't it? She let you in."

"There's a reason I'm friendly with her. Now why the bloody hell were you looking for me?" And for that matter, why were they all sitting in the dormitory? He'd have expected Avery at least to keep his distance. Mulciber too.

"Rosier's had a word with us," Thistletwaithe explained. "Shafiq's family is demanding an Auror inquiry if Dumbledore can't produce the attacker for yesterday within three days. Rosier's made it pretty clear that we're basically sacrificial lambs if it comes to it."

"All of us?"

"Except for Avery, and that's only because he has the Dark Mark, but he's implied that he wants you left out of it as well; you've impressed him, that's for certain." There was some ugly enviousness in Thistletwaithe's voice, but far less the newly minted spy would have expected from a statement like that. This, more than his dishevelled blond hair or nervous eyes, told Severus how much the other boy was rattled, which in turn only brought more light to the fact that for some reason, he trusted Severus to handle this situation.

"What, are you expecting something of me?" Severus asked him, just on this side of harsh, when the other boy continued to look at him expectantly.

"I wondered if that plan of yours had some part of it set up so as to help me and Philes get out of it; we were as much victims as you."

Severus opened his mouth, almost choking on the unsaid vitriol as his mind registered the potential of the situation. Hadn't he just thought that Thistletwaithe trusted him? Sternly ordering his mind, he managed to force his tone to a more sympathetic one. This was, after all, the first opportunity for his new job – whether or not he had Rosier's protection, Severus knew Dumbledore wouldn't let the Aurors get to him, and the other boys were too rattled to see his manipulations for the deeper web he'd need to spin in the coming years if he was to be effective as a spy. He needed to take advantage of that.

"I have to think on it, but I'll let you know."

And that appeared to be exactly what Thistletwaithe was looking for.

Stone, on the other hand, gave him a very sharp look the next time they saw each other, and, if anything, looked forbiddingly serious as he dragged Severus to a corner of the study room and raised silencing spells.

"Is Dumbledore taking care of it?"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Snape, I suggest you not play dumb with me," the black-skinned boy warned.

"Why would you care?"

"Because I have basic human decency, and what was done to those seventh-years is wrong."

"Now who's playing dumb?"

"It's none of your business why I care. Now answer the bloody question!" he hissed out, eyes sweeping over the room sharply.

Severus shrugged, heartbeat picking up speed.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"You think he tells me anything, Stone? It bloody means 'I don't fucking know', all right?" Severus shot back, keeping his voice pitched low. "All I know is that he's aware of what went on during the attack."

"He's covering for you, isn't he?"

Of all his dormmates, Michael Stone was by far the most intelligent one, and that had weighed in heavily when Severus had decided whom to trust to cover for him during his sessions with the Headmaster. But this was the other side of that coin – by the same account, Stone knew that Severus' association with Dumbledore wasn't to the benefit of the other Slytherins, and he could read between the lines with no difficulty.

Licking his lips, Severus held Stone's gaze, and said nothing. After several long, long moments of silence, Stone swore and stepped back.

"Are you a spy?"

" _What_?"

"Are. you. his. bloody. spy?"

One day, that's how long it had taken for him to be found out. One _bloody_ day, and he'd mucked it up!

Except, it was Stone, who'd known something was up for months, probably even before Severus had managed to admit it to himself. It wasn't one day, it was three months. It didn't change anything though; this was still too dangerous to admit, even to Stone. So long as the other boy had no proof, he couldn't do anything outright against Severus, and Severus wasn't about to give him admission of guilt, no bloody way.

Stone didn't back down. The epitome of his name, he stood still and kept up his part of their silent staring match, while Severus tried to find something, _anything_ , to turn the other boy off the scent. He was high on adrenaline, his ears ringing with his heartbeat and the rush of blood, but the instinctive clarity he knew he had in these moments wasn't there, because the fact was that, apart from every single reason he had not to trust the boy before him, he _wanted_ to tell him, wanted to have one person who knew and understood, wanted him to be Lily. And that messed with his mind until the avenues of escape became invisible to him.

But he had to say something. Swallowing past his dry throat, he opened his mouth.

"There's no other evidence," came out, without much of his brain's input. "Other than my testimony."

And there it was – indirect, veiled in inconsequence – the truth that the other boy was looking for. If he could see it, then Severus' fate was sealed.

"So nothing's going to be done directly," Stone reformulated Severus' words and nodded. He looked at Severus for a while longer, obviously debating something with himself, before shocking the greasy-haired Slytherin speechless by extending his hand. "Mickey Bricks is for friends."

A drop of sweat sliding past his ear, Severus lifted his arm and grabbed Stone's hand in a tight grip, relief flooding him; it seemed he truly did have one person in Slytherin in his corner.

"What are you going to do?"

"You'll know it when it happens. You and I have an agreement, and I'll keep to it; your secret is safe with me, Snape."

"Severus. It's Severus."

It felt like sealing some sort of silent pact.

* * *

Lily finally visited the hospital wing on Sunday morning, feeling as if her chest was too tight and her muscles too achy. Madam Pomfrey, rummaging through one of the cabinets near the door, offered her a quiet 'good morning' and pointed her towards the end of the long room, where two wide privacy screens shielded the occupied beds from view. Swallowing with difficulty, Lily forced herself to put one foot in front of the other and approach the sectioned area.

Two out of four beds, on opposite sides of the section, were occupied. To the left was a long-faced, auburn-haired boy, whose throat was swathed in what seemed like miles of bandages – Jasper Fairlot. Clara Shanwick was in a wheelchair near his bed, her feet propped up lightly, bandaged so heavily she looked like she had on skiing shoes. Amir Shafiq, the Head Boy, sat on the other side of Jasper's bed, the only one who looked no worse for wear. And on the other side of the section, in the part that was heavily darkened not only by window blinds but also by some sort of magic that diverted the pathway of light, laying prone on the bed, was the last boy, skin pale as chalk contrasting intensely with his dark hair. He seemed to be whimpering, or perhaps moaning, a low, continuous drone that started rubbing Lily's nerves raw within seconds.

"Hello," she said quietly, walking over to the three seventh-years. "I hope I'm not intruding."

"Lily, hello," Clara greeted her with a wan smile. "Thank you for coming; it's good to see you. Amir, Jasper, this is Lily Evans, she's Alice's friend. Lily, I don't believe you've met Amir and Jasper yet, right?"

"Yes, no, we've not met," she answered. "Nice to meet you both."

"Pleasure to have met you," the Hufflepuff Head Boy answered. His fellow Hufflepuff smiled and gave her a finger wave, but otherwise stayed quiet. Lily, vaguely pointing towards one of the chairs up against the back wall, waited until Clara nodded before summoning the chair as quietly as she could. Pocketing her wand, she sat down and tried to compose herself.

"How are you?"

Clara released a heavy sigh, shrugging with one shoulder lightly.

"On pain relievers. They make me somewhat woozy, but it's better than... anyway, it's second-degree burns for the most part, but they're of the kind that cannot be healed by magic, so I won't be walking for a month or two."

"Oh, Clara," Lily whispered, unable to help herself.

"At least the curse had been removed well before we were found; if it had been allowed to work until we'd gotten to the hospital wing, you'd have lost both your feet," Amir Shafiq noted, and Lily shivered.

"Jasper's vocal cords are shot to hell," Clara continued, voice subdued. "We've no idea if he'll regain his proper voice, let alone how he'll be taking the N.E.W.T.s in a week's time. Amir was the lucky one; he just got hit with a Stunner."

"And you don't remember anything?"

Jasper shook his head, while Amir sighed.

"No. The Headmaster is certain we've been Obliviated."

"It wouldn't even be that terrible, if not for..."

Clara fell silent, her eyes moving to observe their last friend, in the dark corner of the room.

"They used old Dark Magic on him," Amir explained softly, when it became obvious that Clara wouldn't be going on with her sentence. "Headmaster Dumbledore figured out what the curse was – Old English, Middle High German, from the Saxony region, I cannot imagine where a student could have come upon such a spell in the first place – and it's left damage. So did the removal of the curse. He would have been all right if anyone had known the counter-curse, but with the Obliviation we suffered... the Headmaster had to do remove it by brute force." Clara whimpered softly, and Jasper grasped her hand where it rested near his hip on the bed. Lily's throat constricted. "The Head Healer of St. Mungo's is working with the Headmaster to bring in a specialist from the continent. The healers are hoping that someone more familiar with German-based magic would know how to alleviate the damage, but until then he is mostly sedated; if he has an hour or two of lucid periods a day, it's more than expected."

"They must be found, they simply must."

"My father is getting the Aurors involved," Amir told his distressed friend. "And Dumbledore won't let this pass, either."

"I should think not," Lily almost exclaimed. "He's the Headmaster! It's his duty to find the people responsible and remove them from the school!"

To her surprise, the looks she got were not in the least what she was expecting – Jasper appeared mostly amused by her outburst, while Amir looked a little exasperated and Clara seemed almost pitying.

"What?" Lily asked them, feeling suddenly extremely self-conscious.

"The wizarding world doesn't... necessarily put the same emphasis on child protection that the Muggle world does," Clara explained, grimacing lightly.

"Headmaster Dumbledore also doesn't hold the school in nearly as high importance as everyone believes," Amir added. "He is in many ways a competent headmaster, but he is not a pedagogist so much as a politician, and his actions reflect that. Hogwarts has always been a politicised institution, and the fact is that Professor Dumbledore uses it and his posting in it as such."

"But... he can't just let this go!" Lily found herself gasping, aghast at the very thought.

"He won't," Amir assured her. "But not for the reasons you think. He won't let it pass because, for one thing, my father has the ear of several highly-positioned individuals within the Ministry that will make certain this is a prominent thing; and for another, because a message needs to be sent, and this is exactly the correct situation to use for it."

"Message? To whom?"

"To his opponents," Clara said. "To those who'd ordered the attacks on us."

" _Is_ it true, then?" Lily asked pointedly. "The reason behind your attack. You were targeted?"

The three seventh-years exchanged looks that made the lone Gryffindor frown, but she waited them out, a little apprehensive about how this might develop. She had a feeling Peter had been right when he'd told her Clara's group was the one working for Dumbledore, and their actions only served to reinforce that conviction.

It was Clara who turned back to her, and Lily felt her hopes drop; Amir seemed like the leader, not only because he was the Head Boy and the heir to a Pure-blood family of high standing, but also because of his assertive attitude throughout this visit, because he was the one taking the lead even though Lily was Clara's acquaintance, not his. The fact that he wasn't addressing her no doubt meant she'd not be getting much of anything out of the group.

"We are quite certain that we were targeted specifically, by people who believe the reason that you refer to."

Which didn't meant the reason had to actually be true, was what Clara meant. They didn't want Lily to have any concrete confirmation of her suspicions.

"I want to help," she told the older girl softly. "Tell me how, and I'll do it."

Clara smiled. "I app–"

The blood-curdling scream made Lily jump in her seat in fright, heart beating wildly in her chest and her hand automatically reaching for her wand, even as her ears continued to ring from the sound. By the time she found herself standing up and turning towards the noise, Amir was already half-way across the room, running to Holland Vemeer's side, and only then did Lily realise it was this boy who was releasing such awful, _awful_ noise, these screams that broke into loud whines only to pick back up again.

Madam Pomfrey ran in a second or two later, and it was only Clara's soft sob close enough for Lily to pick up over the Ravenclaw boy's pain-filled screams that kept her rooted to the spot, instead of escaping the hospital wing as soon as she could. Instead, she gripped Clara's hand tightly, the older girl squeezing Lily's fingers mercilessly, as the two of them and Jasper waited for Madam Pomfrey to calm the injured boy.

It was probably only half a minute or close to it; certainly it couldn't have been anything resembling long, not with the Matron's proficiency. But to Lily, those were some of the longest seconds of her life, as she stood impotently and watched another teenager suffer. By the end of it, there wasn't a single thought left in her mind about trying to volunteer her help to anyone, all of it blown away by the sight she'd witnessed.

She made paltry excuses and farewells to the three seventh-years and escaped the hospital wing as quickly as she could, only managing two floors before her gagging reflex overcame her and she had to hug the toilet seat while her stomach emptied itself.

She never wanted to witness anything like this again.

* * *

By the end of the weekend, the whole school was extremely familiar with what had happened, and the gossip mill blame was being placed on the seventh-year Slytherins, which afforded Severus and the other four culprits at least a little more breathing room. The tension between them had remained palpable, with Mulciber keeping himself from going after Avery only because he couldn't afford to antagonise Rosier in any way, shape or form, as Avery was officially under the seventh-year's protection. On the other hand, Thistletwaithe and Philes were shunning the two boys, not openly enough for anyone in the other houses to tell, but certainly enough that the rest of the upper-years had noticed things were tense between the fifth-years. That, in turn, meant that Severus wasn't given much of a choice when it came to keeping good terms with all of them – Thistletwaithe and Philes considered him of like mind with them, and it was either keep close with them or alienate them by trying to repair things with Mulciber and Avery. Suffice it to say, it wasn't too difficult a decision for Severus to make, even if it wasn't the most productive one in the long run, though Rosier's interest in him did alleviate some of the pressure on that front.

Not that Severus felt he had any breathing room in this situation, not really. The sense of paranoia didn't leave him, which affected not only his interactions with everyone around him, but also his sleep, his concentration and his temper. He threw himself into the reading of the Occlumency book Dumbledore had given him, desperate for some sort of buffer between himself and the stress of it all, but because he didn't dare read it where one of the Slytherin boys could see, he was left only with moments when he knew he could slip away from them or during the night, neither of which helped him feel prepared for the O.W.L.s starting next week. And it certainly didn't help him hold a civil conversation with Lily.

Because of course he'd forgotten that they'd agreed to do final revisions together on Sunday, and didn't show up at the library, so that by the time she tracked him down in one of the empty dungeon classrooms, she was thoroughly annoyed with him.

"I forgot," was all the justification he could give her.

"You forgot?! You got all upset with _me_ when _I_ forgot about our study session, but now _you_ forgot and it's ok?!"

"Well at least now you can't claim ignorance anymore," he sneered back, ticked off by her attitude, because what right did she have to attack him about this, when she'd forgotten because it had suited her better to go frolicking off with the werewolf, and he'd forgotten because he was barely keeping his head above water as was? "And if I remember correctly, Lily, _you_ are the one who didn't show up _twice_ , so if you want to tally it up, I _still_ come out ahead, don't I?"

"There's talk about Rosier's group being responsible for what happened to Clara Shanwick and her friends. Is that true?" she asked coldly, not rising to his bait, which made him even angrier, and this only angered him all the more because they'd hashed this out – that she'd said she'd come back that day and then hadn't – more or less to Severus' satisfaction.

Her quite dirty and dishevelled appearance had been proof enough of her story about being caught by unruly castle magic. Aside from that, the fact was that he'd felt good enough after their earlier talk to completely lose himself in his experimentation, to the point he'd honestly not even noticed she wasn't there until his stomach had reminded him that it was almost past lunch hour, which had served to give plenty of credence to her insistence that she felt excluded when they got to potioneering experimentation and made him feel like a heel. Perhaps what had tempered his hurt and anger about the fact she'd not shown up was partly that guilt at being upset with her for not noticing something important to him when he'd been just as ignorant of something that had been bothering her. Maybe it was simply that for once he'd truly found himself believing her explanation about circumstances conspiring against them, because that was the story of his life sometimes and because he knew she'd not forgotten this time, not with the way she'd almost tripped over herself in her haste to explain the moment she'd walked into the Great Hall, wearing her story literally on her roughed up hands. In either case, Severus had quite consciously decided to take the Headmaster's advice about not letting anger control him, and had declared the matter closed, if not forgotten.

That resolution had stuck until now, when it had suddenly risen up as an issue again, and this made him angry at himself because there were so many other things that hung in the air between them that their friendship really didn't need him adding resolved matters on top of all the other shit, to say nothing of it being yet another example of his lack of mental discipline that was the reason he'd been in a state of hyperawareness since becoming Dumbledore's spy.

He as angry at Lily for attacking him, he was angry at Dumbledore for manipulating him, he was angry at Mulciber and Avery for forcing his hand, he was angry at the Marauders for constantly hounding him, he was fucking angry at the universe for saddling him with his shitty lot in life, and now he was even angry with _himself_ for being a complete idiot, and it was all coalescing into hot, sharp confrontational attitude at what was obviously Lily's jumping to conclusions she did not have any proof of – because what the _sodding hell_ had Lily connected in her head to be asking him about Rosier's activities, as if she thought it a done deal that he was joining what he knew she designated as 'that evil group' to herself?

So he yelled out, quite aggressively: "How the bloody hell should I know?!"

"Well, you're the one who's trying to crawl up that sod's arse, Severus, you and your friends."

He found himself jumping to his feet, the book landing with a heavy thump on the stone floor.

"Am I your target dummy, Lily?!" he hissed at her, beyond caring when she jerked back to avoid his spittle. "Is that all I'm good for you anymore?! Whenever something goes to shit in this place, I'm automatically to blame because I don't think like you do?"

"I've been to see them," Lily shot back, recovering the lost ground in a flash and advancing until she was so close he could almost feel her breath on his face, "Clara's feet are a _ruin_! She's stuck in a _wheelchair_ , until who knows when, because of those bastards who attacked her! Jasper Fairlot can't talk, and might never recover his voice, because of what was done to him! Holland Vemeer suffers such headaches that Madam Pomfrey almost had to put him in a _coma_ with Draught of the Living Death! Dark Magic that even Dumbledore wasn't sure how to remove, and has to get a specialist from West Germany to try fixing the damage! So don't you _dare_ take the high stand with me on this, Severus, don't you dare, and don't play dumb with me, because you and I both know that those four were targeted for choosing to fight for Dumbledore, and that it was the Slytherin Death Eaters who'd done it, and do not even _try_ to insult my intelligence by claiming that Mulciber and Avery haven't set their sights on joining that fucking _monster_! Your so-called _friends_ , with whom you see nothing wrong, want to hurt innocent people like that! For _fun_!"

"And your friends don't hurt people for fun? Your precious werewolf, who only ever stands idly by while his _pals_ attack us Slytherins?! Your girlfriends, who wouldn't deign to acknowledge a kicked student on the ground if that student wore green? Potter and Black, you think they'd hesitate for a _second_ to attack an innocent student if they thought they could justify it?!"

"They're not putting people in the hospital with Dark Magic!"

"And I am?! When have I _ever_ put another student in the hospital that wasn't Potter and his gang?!"

"Birds of a feather, Severus," she spat.

"Oh, so _you_ get to judge _me_ by the people I live with, and _I_ 'm forbidden from judging _you_ by the people you live with," he said coldly, straightening to his full height and feeling worse than shit and beyond furious because of it, because he was betraying the only true friends besides her he'd ever had, was acting the spy and binding his life forever to Dumbledore's cause and war plans, for _her_ , and all she ever said to him anymore was her own brand of judgmental condescension. And it was a different kind of fury, too – not the kind that made his tongue trip over itself and words stick in his throat, but the kind that gave crystalline clarity of purpose. "Talk about a double standard, Lily. See, _that's_ why I hate Muggle-borns! Because you give yourself the right to pass judgment on everyone else without one speck of understanding as to who we are and how we think and why we've come to be that way! You measure everything by your Muggle standards and find us Magicals wanting, and then you feel _insulted_ when we give you the same treatment!"

" _I'm a Magical as much as you are_!" she screamed out, voice ringing in the empty room and effectively putting a stop to the escalation of the argument. "And I don't judge you by Muggle standards, Severus, I judge you by human standards, and that has nothing to do with whether you can wave a piece of wood around and make things happen."

"That's patently untrue," he answered. "And if you don't believe _me_ on it, Lily, maybe you should ask you darling _sister_ whether you treat _her_ the same as you treat your magical friends, because you seem to have missed the fact that all those letters of hers have been positively _dripping_ hostility towards you and your _judgment_. And _then_ come back to me and try to convince me that you're the only one whose opinion is ever right."

Pure fury flashed through her green eyes. "I may not be right, Severus, but that does not make you right, either, and before you go accusing me of judgmental treatment, take a long, hard look at the way you're judging ninety-nine percent of humans by the action of one miserable bastard that _your mother_ , a witch, happened to choose as her husband and your father. You think I'm judgmental? You, who's defending a group that tried to kill four teenagers!? Well, _fuck. you_."

Then she was out of the room, and all Severus could do was roar in anger and kick the first things that landed under his foot, repeatedly, until he was rid of everything he'd been holding in for days.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, _fuck_!"

* * *

 **A/N:** Er... did anyone really expect that Dumbledore would sacrifice a potentially extremely useful spy for the sake of doing justice by four random students? Severus really isn't that lucky. Also, I feel like I should point out that Dumbledore's explanation regarding Severus' Patronus isn't my own full view of this little quirk of the spell (namely, I think that the fact one's Patronus changes to mirror another's is far more complex than simply saying 'oh, you're really really in love with this person', and that 'shaping' doesn't necessarily have to mean in a good way). We're not nearly done with the Patronus Charm yet.

With regard to the fight, do keep in mind when forming your opinion on it that it takes place mere hours after Lily witnessed a boy screaming in extreme pain in the hospital wing for which most of the school is already blaming the Slytherins, and that she's by no means had enough time to process it fully.


	12. Ch I,10: The Breaking of Camel's Back

**Chapter 10: The Break of Camel's Back**

Lily had never felt as enraged in her _life_ as that Sunday after the fight with Severus. It wasn't even anger any longer – it was pure, undiluted fury, of the kind that made the tears of frustrated anger dry up like a puddle in the sun, the kind that made the boiling of blood turn to freezing ice, the kind that consumed everything in its path, out if allowed release and inside if not.

How dare he act all high and mighty in the face of poor Holland's suffering, how _dare_ he?! Was he so incapable of feeling for anyone but himself, that he was _still_ defending those responsible for the attack on Clara and her friends? That act was indefensible in Lily's mind, and that Severus would even _try_...

She'd never thought she'd live to see the day when _Severus_ of all people disgusted her, but here it was, and she couldn't stand to look at him, let alone anything else, not with those poor students laid up in the hospital wing, not with Holland screaming as if someone was boring into his brain with a two-bit drill, and Severus' only response to that being that he was bothered by Lily asking him point-blank for the truth he knew about that attack.

So too bad that it was Remus' dumb luck that he was the first to run into her. Too bad for him, but Lily didn't care one sodding _bit_ , and when he caught her stomping her way up the stairs on the fifth floor, he turned out to be the ideal outlet for her rage.

"Lily? Is everything all right? You look–"

"All right?" she shot back, glaring at him. "Yes, Remus, everything is _perfectly_ bloody all right!"

"What's wrong?" he asked with a frown, and Lily laughed derisively.

"You tell me, Remus, because I'm sure I don't bloody know. No, actually, I'd really like to know what the bloody hell is wrong with people! Four students get attacked with Dark Magic so bad they'll be recovering for months, one of them might end up _insane_ if his brain doesn't liquefy in his head, and my supposed best friend insists on defending his wanker friends who'd do this without even blinking!"

"Was Snape–"

"And then he has the _gall_ to accuse me of being judgmental over it!" she exclaimed right over his question. "As if I'm some snitty, condescending twat who's pulling her arguments out of her arse! Half the bloody school knows it was him and his _friends_ who attacked Melissa and Rosetta's group after Easter hols, or Mary back in the winter! Does he think I'm stupid, that I'd not caught onto that, or just deaf?!"

"Lily. Lily, calm down."

"And you," she rounded on the sandy-haired boy, narrowing her eyes and her anger at his patronising tone, "you're no better, none of you! The _only_ difference between Potter and Black and those Slytherins is that your precious pals don't use Dark Magic! You think I didn't catch on to your little bullying scheme for the last month, Remus? Send you to distract me, so that those three can attack Severus? What's a little wrist-breaking, right, when Madam Pomfrey can heal it with a flick of her wand?"

"It's not–"

"Don't you dare try to play me for a fool, Remus!"

"Lily, I'm not! They haven't–"

"Haven't what? Been targeting Severus since we were eleven?! Been using you as a distraction to keep me from trying to shield him from their attacks?! Been putting him in and out of the hospital wing for years?!"

"He's put us in the hospital wing plenty of times, too; he's not innocent in this, Lily," the boy said, somewhat pointedly.

"Because four-on-one is so fair, is it, Remus? Oh, no, that's right, it's not four-on-one, is it? So sorry to have misunderstood! It's actually two-on-one, because Peter hasn't either the brains or the bollocks to act independently of Potter and Black, so he shouldn't be counted, and all you ever do, Remus, is stand by! Of course you're not complicit in it, how can you be when all you ever do is turn your head away and bury it in your books, instead of acting like the goddamned Prefect that you are and stopping them!"

"Lil–"

"At least they are upfront about it!" she continued her rant, because she was _beyond_ caring about anyone's precious feelings, and by Merlin, she was going to say her peace to at least one of those four bullying toerags. No more Miss Understanding, not for anyone. "At least with them what you see is what you get! But not with you, oh no! What you do is stand idly by and pretend that it's not happening, that you don't even see your friends acting like the worst of scum, breaking wrists and noses and cursing and hexing people for daring to irritate them! You know what, Remus, that makes you even worse than they are, and I don't know why I'm letting you off the hook for it! You want to talk to me about choices? Well, there you go, Remus, we're talking about sodding choices, and if I'm judging Severus for his faults, then I'm bloody well going to judge you and your friends, too. So yes, everything is _perfectly_ all right! Just hunky-dory!"

Remus didn't say anything else, only stared at her with a gaping, gobsmacked expression that made her curl up her nose in disgusted contempt.

"And of course you have nothing to say to that; I should have expected it. Stay away from me, Remus, I mean it. I'm done with tolerating all of yours' shite, you and Severus both. I don't fucking need this in my life, I really don't."

And with that, she walked away from him, her footsteps echoing heavily as she stomped up the stairs. She didn't turn back to see if anything she'd said had actually penetrated his thick, cowardly head.

She was beyond sick of idiotic boys and their idiotic feuds, and most of all of their immature, childish narrow-mindedness. They weren't worth it, not when Holland Vemeer's screams echoed in her mind the cruelty of the real world that was out to get her and her kind.

* * *

Severus' first meeting with Dumbledore as his informant in the Slytherin House was, in so many ways, more nerve-racking than even those first interactions with his fellow students on Friday. He didn't feel competent enough to judge Dumbledore's actions last Saturday after the admission of manipulation, and so now he didn't know what to expect, which meant that he had no way of preparing himself.

Fuelled by the constant paranoia of the last few days, his cynical side was clamouring in his head that the Headmaster's actions up until this point had all been a sham, a lie craftily constructed to draw him in and push him in the direction that suited the old wizard. Yet there was also a part of him – that small part that had yearned for the fleeting happiness of his childhood memories, the part that was eager for Lily's friendship and Dumbledore's advice – that still held out hope Severus hadn't been played and tricked into servitude, and where he'd even last winter been able to ignore or silence that part of himself, now he couldn't, and that just added fuel to the fire of nervousness and insecurity.

It took him almost three minutes to gather his courage and knock on the Headmaster's office door, and by then, his hands had become clammy and his heart was beating wildly in his chest. When Dumbledore's voice called him in, Severus swallowed with difficulty and pushed the door open, even as he told himself firmly that the best thing was to expect the worst, because at least then he'd not end up being disappointed.

"Severus," Dumbledore greeted him somewhat absent-mindedly, his attention firmly on the letter he was penning.

"Headmaster," Severus intoned, moving to sit in the chair opposite. He clamped his hands in his lap tightly enough his fingers turned white, and kept himself that way from fidgeting, though his body was on the verge of vibrating as his mind immediately began dissecting the fact the Headmaster had addressed him by his name, versus the fact he didn't seem in the least interested in Severus' actual presence.

It took Dumbledore another five minutes until he finished the letter by tapping it lightly with his wand twice to dry the ink and folding it carefully with his wrinkled fingers. Only after he'd handed it to Fawkes and the phoenix had disappeared in a burst of flame did the Headmaster turn to the Slytherin.

"How are you holding up?"

Severus exhaled loudly, unable to stop himself. "None of Mulciber's or Rosier's groups suspect, or at least, I don't think. Michael, however..."

"Have no fear on that account, Severus," Dumbledore spoke up before Severus could gather enough fortitude to admit that bit of bad news. "Mr Stone is a very intelligent young man, and I had expected him to come to certain conclusions sooner or later."

"Sir, I... he's promised me his silence." It was all he had to offer.

"That is more than acceptable at this point in time. However, you haven't answered my question."

Hadn't he? What else did Dumbledore want?

"I wish to know how _you_ are holding up," the old wizard clarified, a little pointedly.

"I'll not burn out, if that's what you mean," Severus replied defensively. It had been hell, the whole weekend start to finish, but he wasn't about to admit _that_ ; he had no intention of giving Dumbledore any reason to regret the last three months.

Dumbledore sighed and moved to sit in the chair next to Severus'.

"Have you slept at all, my boy?"

"I'm fine. It's fine, it's all fine."

The sharp blue eyes studied him over the top of the half-moon glasses for long moments, and Severus felt as if his skin was crawling from the scrutiny, but he stubbornly kept the Headmaster's gaze. Whether Dumbledore had been genuine or not in the past three months, Severus wasn't going to give him anything more that could be used as leverage.

"Very well," the old wizard said in the end, and Severus found himself feeling at the same time relieved and hurt, such a dichotomous sensation that he had no clue what to do with it. "Tell me how far along you are in your Occlumency reading, and we will start from there."

The next hour and a half were so startlingly similar to all of their previous meetings that Severus ended up fully engaged in the lesson by the end of their allotted time in spite of himself. Not only that, but unlike the Patronus Charm, Occlumency was something he understood instinctively. The concepts, though many of them new, were easy enough to grasp and even implement at this beginner's stage, and having Dumbledore guide him through the initial exercises for ordering his mind cut down tremendously on the time these would have otherwise necessitated.

It also helped him feel a little more settled by the end of their session, if not any more decided on pretty much any of his current worries or doubts. It was just that he was so bloody _tired_ , and now that he'd made some inroads with regard to sorting everything most pressing in his mind, the anxiety was lessening enough for sleep to demand its due. His wide yawn ended up making Dumbledore put a halt to their session.

"Do try to get some more sleep," the Headmaster said gently. "I'm certain Mr Stone would be willing to offer you assistance if it is worry that is keeping you from your rest."

"I know how to take care of myself," Severus snapped back, shutting his mouth forcibly enough his teeth clanked against each other.

"I never implied otherwise," the Headmaster replied, face clearing of any expression. "I fear that I will not have time to meet with you until the weekend, as the final preparations for O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s require my full attention in the coming days, and you need to focus on your examinations, as well. I expect you to show your full capabilities on them, Severus."

Severus gave the man a disbelieving look. "What? Why would you care, sir?"

"Because you are more than capable of attaining high grades, and whether you believe it to be so or not, they do matter. Do not short-change your future for a war in the shadows, Severus. It is important to remember what it is that you are fighting for, and succeeding in your chosen profession is certainly one of those things. You know full well what O.W.L.s you need to achieve for a Potions Mastery, and so you shall, yes?"

As if he didn't have enough on his plate at the moment, his cynical side pointed out waspishly. O.W.L.s had been the last thing on his mind in the last few days, and they did seem absolutely insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

And yet, that tiny little hopeful part of him rejoiced at this proof that Dumbledore still cared. Maybe it was only a care for what Severus could contribute as a Potions Master to the old man's cause – well-trained Potions Masters were hard to come by, and there was no way that Slughorn would ever get involved with the war, no way in seven hells – and maybe that was the best Severus would ever get from the wizard in front of him. But to that little hopeful part of him, even this was plenty.

He wanted to be angry at himself for it, for being so pathetic as to be satisfied with attention shown only for the purpose of handling him, and he was, to an extent. Mostly, he was still so very tired, and anger was utterly draining. When it had been the only thing sustaining him from day to day, he'd not even noticed. Now, one of these meetings with Dumbledore, as wrought with tension and doubt as this one had been, seemed more powerful than weeks and months of simmering rage.

That night, he actually really managed to catch some proper sleep, at least until the nightmare containing Lily's angry, condescending face and her pointed accusations drove him to full wakefulness hours before sunrise. However, by the end of the week, the momentary peace he'd managed to get that evening had all but evaporated, and his worries about Dumbledore's motives got side-lined by the fact that Lily was not only _still_ pissed at him, she was actively avoiding him, and in the rare moments when he managed to actually catch her unawares , she was abrasive, curt and otherwise absolutely dismissive, to the point where she shut down every single one of Severus' attempts to speak with her about what had happened on Sunday.

Her actions served quite effectively in driving him out of contrition about exploding at her (especially after he'd learned by way of some unapologetic eavesdropping what had gotten her so riled up that day in the first place, because Severus was incapable of feeling many things, but guilt about what they'd done to those seventh-years wasn't one of them) and straight into pissed as fucking hell. She and her blind standards; he was absolutely sick of them, and of the way she'd been treating him recently. If she wanted to be left alone, he would bloody well leave her alone until they got to Cokeworth and he didn't have the O.W.L.s and Dumbledore and the Slytherins and himself to contend with. And then he was going to corner her and hash it all out to both their satisfaction once and for all, because it was beyond bloody time.

* * *

In the end, Lily spent the last week before the O.W.L.s reviewing with Mary and Bettina and making certain that her path didn't cross with Severus', as, every time she so much as caught a glimpse of him, her anger made her blood boil, and that just left her even more exhausted than all the other things on her mind, because she wasn't the type to hold grudges like that, wasn't the type to constantly revisit negative emotions for the exact same reason over and over, and so consequently had no good strategy for coping with it when her control over those instances wasn't enough.

She avoided Remus just as much. Whether or not he was in on it, the fact was that his friends were using him to distract her while they went after Severus, and if he wasn't going to grow a spine and see how harmful and hurtful their actions were, then she wasn't going to waste her time on him. It was one thing to offer friendship and support when his friends were going behind his back; it was quite another to pretend she wasn't bothered when that friendship was used to hurt someone she cared about. And Severus was right on that one thing – Remus only ever stood by, and in many way, that was as bad as being the one to attack. It was watching an assault and not doing anything to stop it, especially when he had some power to do so, and Lily didn't want those kinds of friends any more than she wanted the kind who protected and defended the actions of those intent on causing others unimaginable pain.

And those other two, James Potter and Sirius Black? They'd learned within days to keep out of her way, because where her disdain for them had been limited to verbally confronting them after specific incidents before all this, now she let it grow into verbal attacks any time she got the chance. They wanted war with Severus? Then she was going to be part of it, and she wasn't going to hold back, no matter what her private disagreement with Severus was. She had limits – she didn't want to actually hex or curse them, really – but those limits were turning out to be very flexible when those boys chose to escalate things, and it seemed that they understood how dangerous it would be for them if they were to push her over those limits.

O.W.L.s ended up being about as hard as she'd expected. In the mornings, they had the theoretical portion, consisting of written exams, and in the afternoon, they had practice for the same subjects. There were anti-cheating charms on the examination papers and quills, all sorts of aids banned from the examination hall (which was in fact the Great Hall, only the four House tables were removed and in their place were hundreds of smaller tables facing the front, one for each student). They took the written portion together with the seventh-years, and Lily spied Clara being brought in a wheelchair to sit for them, her feet still just as heavily bandaged as they'd been last week. Amir and Jasper were also there, standing as close to her wheelchair as long as they could until they were forced to take their seats, but Holland wasn't in attendance, and Lily honestly hadn't expected him to be, not after what she'd witnessed.

Lily did her Charms exams as perfectly as she'd hoped she would, and came out of the Potions examination grinning like an idiot at Severus, who also sported a satisfied smirk for the first time in weeks. That was, however, all her interaction with him for the whole week; within minutes, Severus had slunk away somewhere and Lily had gotten swept up by her friends to discuss the exam. She didn't do too shabbily on either Arithmancy or Ancient Runes, though she was dreading the Transfiguration and Astronomy examinations that were scheduled for week two of the testing.

The first of the second week's lot was the Defence Against the Dark Arts exam, and Lily almost shook her head when she saw the question on werewolves. She managed to finish about three minutes before the end, with just enough time to look around a bit. Severus was three rows over, and obviously completely engrossed with his exam, because he was almost touching the paper with his nose, the way he only did when he had too many things to put down and not enough time to do it, the tip of his quill vibrating furiously as he wrote; to her other side was Potter, yawning and stretching, and using that momentum to ruffle his hair, the prat; Black was four seats behind him, looking half-way manic and showing Potter his thumbs-up; Remus was all the way in the back, chewing on the top of his quill and obviously rereading his answers; Peter was scuffing his shoes and clearly trying to copy off his neighbour without much success; Mary was in the middle row in the very front, brown hair spilling over her shoulder as she wrote; Lily couldn't find Bettina from this spot, but she had no doubt the witch was somewhere in the room, probably slumped over her stretched arm on the desk.

Then Flitwick announced the end of the exam, scolding a seventh-year in the process, and collected the parchments.

Stretching herself, Lily got to her feet and waited for Mary and Bettina to reach her, before they started for the entrance to the Great Hall.

"So, how did you do?" Mary asked, inclining her head at the two of them.

"Fine," Lily answered with a shrug. "It was a good thing most of the really difficult questions were from our third year, since Professor Furulla was the only competent professor we've had so far for DADA."

"Oh, did you get all five signs to recognise a werewolf?" Bettina asked.

"Obviously," Mary said with a nod. "With her recent obsession about them–"

"It's not an obsession," she interrupted her friend, "it was study. And yes, Betts, I did."

"Oh, I hope I can get an 'Exceeds Expectations'," the plumpy witch fretted. "I studied really hard for this one."

"It'll be however it ends up being," Mary declared, waving her hand. "I'm certainly not going to stress about it. Hm, we should find Clo, she was supposed to be waiting for us."

"Oh, she's so lucky to have finished her O.W.L.s last year."

"Yeah, but we have two more years until N.E.W.T.s, and she has to sit for them next year," Lily pointed out. "There she is. Clotilde!"

The sixth-year waved as soon as she spotted them, hurrying to join them. Where Bettina Summerville was a little on the heavy side, brown-haired and brown-eyed, Clotilde Babineaux was a willowy presence, standing out with her blonde hair often dyed strange colours – at the moment, it was sky blue – and often wearing heavy black makeup. It always amused Lily to imagine what Tuney would have to say about her, considering how disparaging she always was about Severus, who was downright Muggle-looking by comparison to the currently blue-haired witch.

"How did it go?" the sixth-year asked, falling in step with them.

"Fine," Mary confirmed, running her hands through her hair in order to braid it over her shoulder; she had even more hair than Lily, which tended to get bushy-looking when not tied back. "It wasn't as difficult as you said yours was."

"Oh, ours was horrible. _'Orrible_ , as my dear old _maman_ would say," she said, emphasising the French pronunciation of the word with a grin. "There's Clara; do you want to go say hi?"

"Yes, of course," Lily confirmed, letting the older girl lead the way counter the flow of the student body until they reached the seventh-year in question. Clara offered them a tired but satisfied smile, while Amir inclined his head and Jasper waved with his fingers.

"How did you do, girls?" Clara asked.

"All right, it seems," Lily answered. "You guys?"

"Better than we'd thought we would, haven't we, Jas?"

The seventh-year Hufflepuff nodded his head a few times, grinning all the while.

"So, how... how are you doing with the practical portions so far?" Bettina asked him, smiling a little abashedly.

"Wordless magic," Amir explained, giving his housemate a proud look.

"Or near enough," Clara corrected him, eyes narrowing at Jasper, who shifted from one foot to the other. "Madam Pomfrey was against him doing it, insisted that he take a deferral until she gave him a clean bill of health, but Jasper here's a right stubborn mule, aren't you, Jas? Keeps trying to whisper the spells."

The boy in question mouthed something exaggeratedly at her, waving his hand about as if he was casting a spell and making a face at the same time.

"He's not the best at wordless magic," Amir translated. "But he's miles better than he was last month, and the Ministry has agreed to give him a second chance in September if he fails the practical portion because of his injuries."

"And Holland?" Clotilde asked. "Any better?"

Clara's face pinched into a grimace of grief, and Amir shook his head.

"Still the same. He's been transferred to St. Mungo's, and the curse expert from West Germany's arrived a few days ago from what my father's managed to find out."

"I hope he can do something for Holland," Lily said, almost shuddering at the memory of those screams. She'd had nightmares about them in the last two weeks, very unpleasant experiences that left her emotionally shaken and physically exhausted. She meant her words from the bottom of her heart.

"We'll see."

"Well, we're off to review some before lunch," Clara told them as Jasper reached for the wheelchair handles. "Good luck with your practical portion."

"You, too," Mary answered, and the two groups separated, moving in different directions. Lily and her friends decided quickly enough to go outside; the day really was hot, but after being cooped up in the castle all morning, some actual sun was going to do them good.

Bettina began asking Clotilde what she knew of Jasper, while Mary started digging through her bag in search of what was probably some snack food she'd filched from the kitchens this morning. Lily, meanwhile, was trying to spot Severus in the crowd of students exiting the castle.

"Have you seen–"

"Remus?"

"What? No. Well, sure, him too, but I meant–"

"Oh, not that Slytherin," Mary said with a slight whine, letting the flap of her bag fall from under her chin in order to meet Lily's eyes. "When will you finally dump him?"

"Certainly not so long as you keep asking me that," she shot back, annoyed. "He's my oldest friend, Mary."

"Much good he is, when he's in cahoots with those disgusting You-Know-Who supporters from his House."

"Why do _you_ care?" she asked the brunette girl. "Last time I checked, you barely knew who Voldemort is."

"Yes, but..." Pursing her lips, Mary huffed. "Well, if you must choose, Remus is by far the better choice."

"Of a friend? Why would I choose between friends?" Lily asked her, blinking in confusion and thinking that she could have avoided this whole discussion if she'd told her girlfriends that she was currently angry with both boys. She was not up for pointless discussions.

"No, I meant–"

"There's James!" Bettina exclaimed, cutting off whatever Mary was about to say; most girls had a crush on the guy, and Bettina was not any exception to this. Aside from his looks, Lily didn't know why anyone would like him at all – his arseholery far outweighed any remotely positive qualities he may have possessed in her eyes. She looked across the lawn to the lakeshore, and it took her a moment to spot what Bettina had seen – Potter and Black were standing, while Remus and Peter were on the ground, their feet in the lake shallows; worse, however, was the fact that Severus was walking straight past them. Then, before she could do more than gasp, Potter spoke something that made Severus drop his bag and reach for his wand, but before he could pull it out completely, Potter was disarming him.

Lily's heart began hammering in her chest as she shoved her bag into Clotilde's hands and dug into her own pocket to get her weapon, her feet already picking up speed as she ran towards the boys. She knew where this was about to go, and no matter her last argument with Severus, no matter her firm decision to keep away from him, no matter that they seemed incapable of communicating anymore, right now she could not and would not let those two pricks attack and humiliate him in front of half the school, not on her watch.

But the path from her friends to the lake shore was too long for her to reach Severus in time, and she could only watch as Black cast a spell that knocked Severus off his feet just as he was about to grab his wand again. Then the crowd around them began closing, so that Lily lost sight of them for a moment or two and had to shove and push to clear herself a way to the centre.

She was close enough to hear the next spell they used against him, Potter's this time, and fury rose like a tidal wave when she saw that the _Scourgify_ had been directed at Severus' mouth, so that he was spluttering and coughing and _gagging_ –

"Leave him _alone_!" she screamed out, finally struggling her way through until she could cast the cancelling spell on Severus. The people around them were laughing, and Peter was even clapping, the bastard, and all Lily felt was rage that Potter and Black were _still_ going after Severus, that this was the third time in a month, and they all, everyone who was standing around and watching and jeering and laughing and _not stopping it_ , behaved as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

Well, not this time; this time, they'd bloody well pushed her past those limits she'd had, and she was going to teach them a lesson.

"All right, Evans?" Potter asked, obviously purposefully lowering his voice.

"You leave him alone, Potter! He's done nothing to you!" she yelled, stepping between Severus and the two Gryffindors to block their view of the Slytherin and allow the greasy-haired boy to recover from almost choking on soapwater.

"Well," Potter said, deliberating the point, "it's more the fact that he exists, if you know what I mean..."

Her stomach turned.

"You think you're being funny, don't you? What kind of _sick_ reason is that?!" she spat out, clenching her fists so tightly they began shaking, because otherwise she was going to plant them in his smug face, and that wasn't going to get this situation sorted out any faster. "What is _wrong_ with you four, for god's sake, you sodding wankers?!"

She turned away from him to help Severus up, but Potter grabbed her arm and whirled her back around to face him.

"Let me go, you arrogant, bullying toerag," she snarled at him. "I am not going to tell you again – _leave him alone_!"

"I will if you go out with me, Evans," he answered. "Go on – go out with me and I'll never lay a wand on old Snivelly again."

The _nerve_ of the little shit! "Not if you were the last man on E–" Lily exclaimed, outraged, but before she could finish her sentence, a curse flashed past her, grazing Potter's cheek, and his grip on her arm vanished as he gasped and reached for his face, a splatter of blood flying onto his robes.

"Oi!" Black exclaimed, and by the time Lily turned around, Severus was hanging upside-down in the air, so that his robes were falling over his head, and of course he wore them in the old wizarding fashion, without any Muggle clothing underneath, so that everyone could see his pants and his skinny, pale legs.

Horror washed over her as she stared at the sight, Potter and his wounded face completely forgotten at the sight of such humiliation of her best friend that made her twitch and grimace. Oh, Severus was never going get over this, because there was uproarious laughter at the sight, as if this wasn't tormenting but _funny_ , as if–

"You let him down _right bloody now_ , Black!" she screamed out, raising her wand towards the Gryffindor because she didn't know the counter-spell to this one, and wasn't this one of Severus' spells anyway? How the hell had Potter and Black gotten hold if it? "Or else." Black eyed her wand, then looked over her shoulder at Potter, before giving her a toothy grin and doing as she'd asked.

"Bossy one, aren't you, Evans?"

Turning away from him, she tried again to move towards Severus, who'd managed to disentangle himself and get to his feet, but Black shot the Full Body-Binding Curse past her and Sev, rigid as a board, fell down again.

Incandescent with rage, Lily whipped her wand back and pointed it squarely at Potter's chest.

" _Stop this and release him this instant_!" she snarled. "Or I swear to god, I will hex you into the hospital wing!"

"Ah, Evans, don't make me hex _you_."

"You try," she hissed. "You try, Potter, and we'll see which one of us will be in pain. _Don't_ test me."

After another tense moment, Potter sighed deeply and cast the counter-curse.

"There you go," he told Severus loudly as Lily kept both him and Black in her eyesight, in case they tried something yet again. "You're lucky Evans was here, Snivellus, your knight in shining arm–"

"I don't need help from filthy little Mudbloods like her!"

 _M–_

The ground dropped out from under her, and ice spread through her veins, squeezing her lungs mercilessly.

 _Mud–_

Her fingers felt like ice, and her cheeks too, and she _couldn't breathe_ , couldn't–

 _Mudblood_

Her heart was pounding in her ears, galloping like a horse, as she stared at wide, rage-filled black, black eyes through her blurry vision, and her face felt slack in disbelief, because he _couldn't have_ , she'd heard it wrong, he _couldn't have_ , not her, how could he've–

 _Filthy little Mudblood_

Severus'd–

"Fine, that's the last time I bother," broke through the pounding in her ears, sharp and crystalline and foreign, and _had she said that?_ How had she _said_ it, without her voice breaking, _how_? "You're on your own from now on, _Snivellus_."

 _He'd promised!_

The tear on her cheek tickled, and she wiped it off with numb fingers, as the ice in her veins gave way to blistering pain, that felt like someone was twisting a knife in her chest, and she couldn't bear it, _couldn't_ –

The promises of Slytherins. Merlin, she was _such_ a fool.

Potter was grinning as if he'd won the lottery.

" _Slugulus Eructo_!"

 _There, now he'll have something to grin about_ , she thought as she turned her wand on Black. " _Naris Nychterida_!"

Slugs and bats burst out of the two Gryffindors.

The _last_ time.

"Lily! Lily, wait! Lily, please! _Lily_!"

A savage scream tore from her ragged throat as she fought her way out of the crowd.

She needed to get _away_.

"Lil– _Fucking move!_ _Lily!_ "

She was not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry, she was _not_.

She couldn't do this anymore, not after this, she _couldn't._

" _Lily_!"

She was _done_ with him.

"Lily, what–" Mary began as Lily tore her bag out of Clotilde's hands and began sprinting, not stopping until she was in the Prefects bathroom, behind locked secure doors, where she could sit and properly sob herself into exhaustion, clutching her bag to her chest and thinking that nothing had ever hurt as much as this hurt.

 _How could he do this to me?_

* * *

Severus had no clue how he managed to get through the practical portion of the DADA exam, because all that was ringing through his ears was that word that he'd said, that _fucking word_ he'd called Lily by, and he could not even piece together how it had come to it, how he'd lost control over his fury so badly that he'd not even known what he was saying, that he'd thought Lily had been about to laugh instead of cry, that he'd not seen Lily there from Potter's sneers and the jeering laughter and the utter humiliation and the thought that he needed saving like the worst kind of incompetent, that she'd made it all worse and had seen him so weak, that–

He'd tried to catch up to her, hadn't even given a thought to getting revenge for what had happened, had only been thinking of trying to apologise and explain to her what had happened after the rage had left him and he'd grasped what had happened, what he'd _done_ , but the crowd had stopped him, and her Gryffindor friends too, until she'd vanished and he had no hope of tracking her down in the school.

Her friends had congregated around her and kept her away from him while they'd all waited for the practical portion of the exam, and she'd been long gone by the time 'S' names had gotten their turn, so that all he could do was go to Dumbledore's office and sit with his back against the door, waiting for the old man and hoping against hope that he'd have some idea what Severus was supposed to do, because this wasn't how it was supposed to be, he'd chosen her over the Slytherins, he'd _chosen_ , and it wasn't going to matter, everything was going to be completely worthless and pointless and useless, and he had no idea how to deal with that.

"Speak with her," Dumbledore urged him once he'd returned to the office and Severus had told him the whole thing in a rush. "Miss Evans is a reasonable young woman, and while you have hurt her, I believe she will be willing to hear your apology."

"And if she doesn't?"

"Then you tell her to come speak with me."

What that meant, Severus couldn't parse out, but it gave him new determination to fix this mess. So, completely disregarding what his fellow Slytherins would think – fuck them, too, all the spying in the world was worthless anyway if Lily wasn't in his life – he planted himself in front of the Fat Lady's portrait and pulled out his _Advanced Potion-Making_ textbook, trying to occupy his mind with the damn cutting curse he'd been attempting to perfect for months now, that still hadn't worked properly today, as he waited for one of Lily's friends to walk by.

It was only his crappy luck that this happened to be Mary Macdonald. Of all Lily's friends, she liked him the least, and if it had been Clotilde Babineaux or Bettina Summerville, he could have at least had a reasonable hope of getting something, but with Macdonald, even getting her to stop and speak three sentences to him was an achievement.

"Look, can you please get her?" he asked while the brunette witch stared at him in clear distaste.

"You've done enough to her."

"I need to apologise to her."

"She doesn't want to hear your apologies."

"Then I want to hear her tell me that herself," he persisted. "I'm going to sleep right here, on the floor under this portrait, unless she comes out. You tell her that."

Macdonald made a disgusted face and slipped through into the Gryffindor quarters, and Severus sat back down on the ground, ignoring the jeers and looks of Gryffindors that passed in and out. It was late, after dinner, and they still had exams tomorrow, which was the only good thing in all of this, because at least most of the students were inside and had no intention of coming out again tonight.

Finally, after what had to be hours, the portrait opened to let Lily out, arms tightly crossed and keeping her dressing gown wrapped protectively around herself. There were traces of anger and hurt in the look she gave him, yes, but it was mostly colder than anything he'd ever seen cross her face, and it twisted his insides until he felt like a stuttering wreck.

"I'm sorry," he blurted out the moment he climbed to his feet.

"I'm not interested."

It was her voice that frightened him the most in that moment, flat and expressionless, as if there was not a speck of emotion leftover in her for him, and it dried his throat and made panic twist his gut.

"I'm _sorry_!"

"Save your breath. I only came out because Mary told me you were thinking of sleeping here."

"I was. I would have done. Lily, I never meant to call you Mudblood, it just–"

"Slipped out?" she interrupted him frostily. "It's too late. I've made excuses for you for years. I stood up to Potter and Black for you, I defended you. None of my friends can understand why I even talk to you. You and your precious little Death Eater friends – you see, you don't even deny it! You don't even deny that's what you're all aiming to be! After all, you're the only people in this place who use that word, aren't you?"

Severus' head swam, because she sounded like a stranger, sounded completely unlike herself, with the impersonal words and generic arguments, with none of the fire of their last few fights, as if the last four months had never happened. Had she stopped caring? Had she ever cared at all? But that didn't make sense, it didn't–

"Lily, I wasn't thinking, it wasn't–"

"What? What wasn't it, Severus? Wasn't meant for me? Wasn't intended to hurt me? Wasn't supposed to have come out of your mouth? Why am I ever the only one that you feel that way about, huh? What makes me so damn different from Mary or Clara or a hundred other students in this place, whom you've no problem calling Mudblood? But it's just a symptom of a bigger problem with you, isn't it? You, with your hatred for your father and your sneering down on people who've not grown up with magic. You're no better than all those bloodist _arseholes_ you spend your time with. I bet you can't even wait to join You-Know-Who, can you?"

"No, Lily– Lily, please, please, listen to me!"

"No! No, I won't, not anymore!" she yelled out, tears gathering in her eyes, and it hit him that she hadn't stopped caring, not at all, she was just wearing a cold façade to protect herself, one he was finally cracking, and this made a surge of paradoxical relief flood his veins, just for a second before– "I am _done_ making excuses for you, do you understand me?"

This was so much worse.

"Lily–"

"You promised me!" she screamed out, so forcefully he stumbled back, as tears slipped past her lashes and onto her cheeks. " _You promised me!_ How could you do this to me, how could–"

He took a desperate step forward, and she pulled back sharply, words hanging unsaid between them, green eyes stabbing at him. " _No._ I am _done_. You've chosen your way, I've chosen mine."

She turned to step back through the portrait, and Severus lunged, grabbing her arm tightly in his and tugging her back to face him.

"Lily, please," he begged, feeling his own tears gathering in his eyes. "If you won't listen to me, go see Dumbledore."

"Where the hell do you get off on invoking _Dumbledore_?"

"I can't tell you here, all right, I can't. But I'm not – I've made my choice, but it's not – just, please, if you'll not listen to me, go speak to the Headmaster before you decide anything, _please_."

She tugged her arm out of his grip and fairly fled, and all Severus could do was stand there, watching the Fat Lady give him pointed looks as she swung back into her normal place, and beg the red-haired, green-eyed girl that was everything to him over and over in his mind to go see Dumbledore, because it was Severus' last chance of fixing this.

* * *

"Why did you do that?" Remus asked his two friends that night after they'd all gone to the dormitory. James was pale from all the slug vomiting, and Sirius seemed to still be in pain from all the bats flying out of his nose, and the only one not very affected was apparently Peter, because Remus' skin was still crawling, so much he felt like he finally understood the wolf for wanting to scratch his skin off.

"Do what?" Sirius said in that blithe way of his that had started really irritating Remus since the night Lily had told them she knew about the Incident. The other boy was pissed at Lily for all the bat sneezing, but beyond that it seemed like he didn't give two flying shits about what they'd done, and now that Remus was thinking about it, it went even further than the Incident or attacking Snape; when they'd talked about the next full moon, Remus suddenly remembered, Sirius hadn't seemed the least bit worried that they might run into anyone from the school if they went exploring the grounds, and he barely showed any worry over that poor first-year who'd had an allergic reaction to the hot sauce they'd put in the Slytherins' food before Easter.

That just added to this feel of dirtiness, inside and out, that hadn't left Remus ever since the afternoon, when he'd kept to his book instead of acting like the prefect that he was and stepping in – just like Lily had accused him of doing not ten days ago. He'd heard her words, yes, but hadn't given them much thought, not with the O.W.L.s around the corner and with the four of them working out what to do for the full moon. The incident by the lake this afternoon had brought them back to the forefront of his mind, and there they'd been buzzing since, a never-ending drone of castigation, echoing with the shocking fury they'd been delivered with. He'd tried to ignore it, tried to rationalise it away, but it didn't help – he still felt like a failure, and now that he was thinking about other situations regarding his friends, that feeling just kept growing and growing until he felt like he'd drown under it.

Lily was right. The painful truth was that his friends really were just sodding wankers, were bullying toerags who didn't care about anything but their own amusement, and he was just as bad for enabling them. It hadn't been something that he'd noticed very much; when he was younger, when it was pranking more than anything else, he had gladly joined in the fun. He'd not noticed the escalating violence of their actions in the past two years, or had ignored it, and he'd been quite comfortable in that veiled existence.

Not any longer. Ever since Lily's first confrontation with them back in March, he'd been plagued by the growing discomfort of it, the knowledge that his best friends, the people who could so easily accept him and his affliction – more than that, even, taking on a very dangerous and difficult branch of magic for him – could be so disgusting towards someone equally unlucky when it came to his lot in life.

Because, as much as he disliked the Slytherin boy, Remus couldn't deny that there were frightening similarities between Severus Snape and himself.

Oh, not in the biggest thing of all, really, but other, little things. They were both poor; they both kept to themselves; they both had connections to Dark Magic; they both wanted to be accepted. He'd never really thought of it before, Snape was just a perpetually greasy Slytherin who lorded over everyone in Potions class and yelled abuse about the Marauders, and who happened to be Lily's acquaintance.

And now, after today... James' words had made his skin crawl – _it_ _'_ _s more the fact that he exists, if you know what I mean_. Would he have thought the same thing of Remus, had their circumstances been different? If Remus had ended up in Ravenclaw or Slytherin? If he'd been best friends with Lily?

Did it fall down to that for James? He liked the girl, so he felt the need to bully her best friend? He'd certainly made several pointed comments about Remus getting close to her over the last few months. Or was it more than that? Was it his disgust with all things Slytherin, his prejudice really, if you thought about it, strengthened by years of watching Sirius barely survive in that house of his, with that mother of his? And what was Sirius' excuse, that he didn't approve of Dark Arts? Why, then, did he not insist on doing these same things to other Slytherins in equal measure?

Remus hadn't stepped in today, and Lily's voice – _you stand idly by_ – kept shouting at him in his head. He hadn't stepped in because he'd grown used to inactivity, to not caring whether his friends were out of line, to ignoring the fact that he'd been given the authority that he had precisely because they needed to be controlled. His reticence to do anything, his preference to simply pretend nothing was happening, it had cost the only girl who'd ever shown him real, actual kindness, even after she'd found out about his condition, and it had cost her dearly, if her expression tonight was any indication.

He was dreading what might happen, but the guilt and the memory of Lily's accusatory eyes, the thought of losing the one friend he'd really made for himself, were pushing him to do something, to fix this, and in the end, his fear of being alone and not accepted wasn't really strong enough to suffer through it. Standing idly by and doing nothing was no longer an option, not when he barely controlled his need to go into the shower rooms and scrub his skin off for what he'd let happen.

"Why did you attack and humiliate Snape today?"

"Because he's Snape," James pointed out.

"What's with you, Remus?" Peter asked. "It's just Snivellus."

"If I'd not been in Gryffindor, would you have been friends with me?"

"Of course we would, Moony," Sirius assured him without any deliberation. "Why wouldn't we?"

"Because I'm a Dark creature," Remus reminded him, throat clogging from fear of rejection, but words coming out nonetheless. "Because I'm poor and boring."

"What's that matter?" James asked, clearly confused. "We don't care if you don't have money, and you're not boring!"

"To be fair, Prongs, he kinda is a bit boring. But only since he became a Prefect."

"And it's not your fault you're a werewolf," Peter butted in.

"Just like it's not Snape's fault that he's a Slytherin."

"Moony, what's with you tonight? Why are you suddenly interested in Snivellus?"

"Maybe because Lily's my friend, too, and what you did hurt her."

"I had nothing to with that!" James exclaimed, sitting up on his bed. "Snape's the one who called her that word!"

"After you filled his mouth with soap and hung him upside-down so that everyone present could see his underwear."

"That doesn't excuse what he did."

"It doesn't excuse what you did, either! You started it, James, you hold equal responsibility! Don't you three get it? You attacked him _for existing_! What kind of sick reason is that?! Do you even know who does that? Evil people, psychopaths, all those blood purists who call Muggle-borns 'Mudbloods'!"

"I didn't see you having any problems with it today, Remus," James pointed out, voice hard.

"Yes, well, I have a problem with it now," he shot back, standing up to pace their dorm. "I have a problem with it because I don't like what you're becoming."

"And what's that?" Sirius asked coolly.

"People who are willing to sacrifice their best friends for a prank. People who have no problem with wilful murder."

"Is this about that incident four months ago?"

"It was just a joke," Sirius dismissed it.

Remus shook his head violently, clenching his eyes shut against the headache that was starting to build behind his eyelids. How had he never noticed just how _blind_ they all were to the cruelty of their actions?

"Making me a murderer is a joke to you, Sirius?" he asked weakly, falling onto his bed.

"Nothing happened, Remus!"

"But it could have."

"But it didn't."

"That's not the point, Sirius. The point is that you know how difficult my affliction is for me, you know! And yet you still have so little regard for me that you'd be willing to put me in a position where I could accidentally pass it on to someone, even hypothetically! Do you know how that makes me feel?"

"It's just Snivelly, and _nothing happened_!"

He felt like crying.

"You're a cold bastard, Padfoot, you know that?"

"Moony, come on," James coaxed, placing his hand on Remus' shoulder. He jerked away from the touch.

"No. No, James. Are you even a little bit sorry, Sirius? Was there ever a moment when you thought that you'd lost control of the situation? Just one little moment when you thought I might actually hurt him?" He could see, in Sirius' eyes, that there really was such a time. "Did you feel anything when that happened? Did you even consider me in that moment, what it would have done to me, to be responsible for killing him or turning him?"

Sirius didn't respond, just stared at him with wide grey eyes, and Remus couldn't even tell if he was finally coming to that conclusion, or if he was stunned Remus was behaving like this.

Wiping his tears away angrily, Remus shook his head.

"You never think about anyone but yourself, Sirius. And you, James, attacking Snape because Lily doesn't like you. Do you know how petty that makes you? How shallow? How bloody _stupid_?! Do you really think that you can win her over by filling her best friend's mouth with soap and making him choke on it, hanging him upside down and letting him fall on his head, while _flirting_ with her? How is that something a sane, normal person would do?"

"Like you're any better, Remus. You've never said a word against our actions, not once. And for that matter, you never said anything about those three times when we accidentally ran into the Hogsmeade villagers out near the border of the Forbidden Forest either."

"Well, I'm saying it now!" he yelled. "And don't think that I'm not as disgusted with myself over it, because I am! All of it! The attack on Snape, the outings, the _lying_ , the Shrieking Shac–"

"Snape wouldn't have stopped otherwise," Peter piped up, derailing the whole conversation.

"What?" Remus asked, brain stalling at the change in topic.

"He was close to figuring it out anyway, and this certainly stopped him from revealing either your secret or what we do every full moon," the pudgy boy pointed out, voice dismissive. "I'd rather not go to Azkaban for it, really, and you know what he would have done with this information. This way, Dumbledore got him to keep quiet or else, and we're all in the clear. There's no reason why anyone else would figure us out, and if they do, Dumbledore will protect us because otherwise we can reveal that he'd hushed up a murder attempt."

Surprise catching him in the chest, Remus turned to look at Sirius.

"Is that why you did it? To, what, to _kill him_ so that he'd not expose us?! To scare him off by giving him the exact information you wanted to keep him from telling everyone?! To get us leverage by turning us into attempted murderers?! Do you hear how insane that is?!"

But it was obvious to him that Sirius hadn't been thinking along those lines at all, because he looked as surprised as Remus felt.

"No. No, that's not your style, is it, Sirius? It would require you to actually _think_ before acting, wouldn't it? Think, for more than that one moment when you decide what to do, like your brilliant idea that we should _plan_ our next _adventure_! In which we put other people in jeopardy! So that we could go have _fun_ in the Forbidden Forest!"

"Oh, don't pretend that hasn't done you a _world_ of good!" Sirius snarled. "You look me in the eye and tell me that the last eight months hadn't been ten times easier on you than the last ten _years_ , I dare you!"

"Yes, they were, but it wasn't my idea to start getting out of the Shrieking Shack and go haring off into the backyard woods of the Hogsmeade village!"

"No, you just suggested we build an actual door on it, instead of using the tunnel," James pointed out sharply. "Remus, you've been as complicit in that as we have! You _liked_ the idea after the first time!"

"Because I didn't think we'd be staying close enough to Hogsmeade to run into people!"

"And what about those plans you seem suddenly so disgusted with?" Sirius asked coldly. "If I remember correctly, we barely had to convince you of anything! Yesterday you had no problem with roaming around the Quidditch pitch, and now suddenly you have a problem of getting close to _Hogsmeade_!"

"I didn't want to do it! I told you I didn't!" Remus yelled back. "You were the ones who kept trying to convince me, and I rolled over for you like I always do, like I did in January when you wanted to get out and like I did in April and May when we almost ran into those people! Those are on _you_ , Sirius, you and James and Peter, because I sure as hell don't know what the fuck I'm doing when the wolf's steering the broom! It's the same thing as this, you push and push and push and you don't seem to understand that there are limits and you're crossing them and dragging me with you! You're going too far, and I won't let you do it anymore!"

"Won't let us?" James repeated, almost incredulous. "Won't _let_ us?! Who are you to tell us what we can do?"

"I'm a Prefect, and I'm your friend."

"Oh, you are? Because I haven't noticed, I really haven't," his friend spat out. "After everything that's happened, after everything we've ever done for you, you call us psychopaths?"

"Is that how it is?" he asked. "You learned advanced magic for me, so that makes me indebted to you? You're willing to be friends with me only if I turn a blind eye to every malicious and violent thing you do? What's next, you'll threaten to tell everyone what I am if I don't think like you do?"

"No, Remus, of course not," Peter said, voice soft. Remus gave him a sad smile.

"Well, then, you seem to be the only one who thinks that, Peter. You know, Marauders were pranksters, were mischief-makers. They were equal opportunists, they didn't discriminate, they wanted to make people laugh, wanted to shock. They weren't selective bullies who attacked those weaker than themselves. Do you three even see what we've become? You three are my only friends, and you are becoming people I don't like. I'm becoming someone I don't like by enabling you. I don't like Snape any more than you do; I think he's malicious and slimy and rotten inside. But what happened today, it makes my skin crawl, because it's proof that we're no better than all those other people who throw around words like 'Mudblood' and hex them for who their parents are and not care that they're hurting everyone around them! So if that makes me unfit to be your friend, then just tell me, so that I can go apologise to Lily for what happened today without having the thought of you judging me for it hanging above my head. At least I'd feel good about myself for once."

There was no answer from his three friends; Peter looked chastised, and James looked troubled and Sirius looked incensed, but none of the three responded. So Remus took it as, perhaps not truly an answer either way, but a very strong indicator that they were conflicted on something true friends would never be conflicted on, and the pain of that understanding cut to the quick.

He left them there, feeling despondent and disgusting and nauseated, fear of rejection lodged in his throat, but as he descended the staircase in search of his only other friend, a very small part of him felt so relieved, because he'd finally gathered the courage to stand up to something wrong, to say what he thought, and silence Lily's voice in his head the right way. It felt almost liberating, this thought that after five years, he could hold his head high because he'd done the right thing.

That was what Gryffindor was all about, in his mind, being brave enough to stand up for one's convictions, and for the first time in his life, Remus felt worthy of being sorted into this House.

Lily was in her dorm, and he got Bettina to get her for him. When she came down, she looked tired and so very sad, that it broke his heart a little bit.

"What do you want, Remus?"

Her words were clipped, and her tone brusque and closed-off. She was angry with him, too, it seemed; unlike his friends, though, he felt that she had every right to be angry with him. He licked his dry lips and gathered that same courage. He had to say this, there was no other option.

"I wanted to say I'm sorry for what they did to Snape today, and I'm sorry for not stopping them. I should have, but I..."

"You were afraid they'd reject you," she finished for him coldly.

"Yeah," he agreed, his voice barely a whisper. "You were right, about what you said to me ten days ago. All of it. You were right."

She nodded, though it didn't seem to bring her much satisfaction.

"Are you and he... I mean, did you make up? About what he called you?"

"No. I don't know if I can get past it."

"I don't really know why you're friends with him, and I don't think it's mine to know, but for what it's worth, I don't think he meant it."

She gave him a sad half-smile, finally unwinding a little. "I don't know if it even matters. I really don't." And with that, she turned to go back to her dorm. He hesitated just a moment – in for a penny, in for a pound – then called out to her.

"Not that I'm in any position to give you advice, Lily, but I think you should take a few days to figure it out; don't go doing anything hasty that you might later regret."

And as he watched her walk up the stairs and disappear from view, Remus was startled by the realisation that in spite of his fear, he didn't regret his words to his friends, not really, not yet.

For the first time in his life, he'd done what he believed was the right thing to do, and the knowledge that he could – even in the face of possibly losing three fourths of his friends – was empowering. In his father's need to protect him from the man's own guilt, in his mother's need to compensate for her own inadequacies as a Muggle mother of a wizarding child with a horrible affliction, in his own fear of what he was, Remus had lost his spine somewhere along the way. Finding it again felt _good._

* * *

 **A/N:** As I'm sure _everyone_ can tell, big segments of this chapter are taken from _Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix_ , Chapter 28: Snape's Worst Memory, as well as from _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_ , Chapter 33: The Prince's Tale. They were obviously tweaked to suit my narrative, both timeline-wise (Lily and the girls not being at the lake edge) and reaction-wise (Lily's primarily, but of others as well).

For those who're interested in my general line of thinking about this, on reread both scenes felt emotionally surprisingly flat on Lily's part to me - I mean, in canon, her reaction to Severus calling her 'Mudblood' is to blink, throw an insult back and continue yelling at James about his behavior, which does not to me a best friend in distress make (to be honest, I'd not pegged them as anything but 'good-samaritan-type getting insulted by a bullied boy for her effort' until DH came out, and _certainly_ not best friends); ditto for their confrontation afterwards, where she underlines her dismissal of their relationship with their differing political stances, rather than personal emotional injury that I would have expected. Together, these two scenes made it hard for me to believe that Lily truly considered Severus anything resembling a 'best friend' by the end, given that I can imagine myself reacting far more overtly emotionally to such a situation, and I'm the definition of logic-over-emotion personality (which I don't see Lily presented as). It's why I've always believed that she'd distanced herself emotionally from Severus well before all this had taken place (or was just never truly emotionally invested in the friendship in the first place), and why I never quite bought the idea that they could have patched things up afterwards, and definitely not to the point of becoming romantically involved. It's a big part of why I'd chosen to start my own storyline well before this Incident, when it was still conceivable to me that their relationship could retain its emotional charge while continuing to deteriorate to the point where these events, taking Severus' evolution into account, could still logically transpire similarly to canon (that's its own bag of writing headache; see A/N in Ch 12 if interested). _  
_


	13. Ch I,11: The Disclosure of Truth

**Chapter 11: The Disclosure of Truth**

Severus spent that Monday evening in one of his usual haunts, a disused classroom in the dungeons, sitting in the corner of the room and hugging his knees. He needed to get himself into some order before his friends – supposed friends – accosted him, because he knew they would; they'd been badgering him about Lily for years, and lately, their comments had gone down a decidedly vulgar direction. Lily publically shunning him was going to be gossip for their souls, and he knew that if he didn't manage to compartmentalise what had happened well enough, they'd break him. And even if Lily did hate him forever for this, even if he'd thought he didn't care about spying and his friends and the war, now that he'd had a bit of time to process what had happened between them this evening, the truth was reasserting itself – that Severus had taken upon himself this task, and it didn't much matter why he'd done it, because it was his word given and so his duty, one he planned to see through. He may have accepted because of Lily, but Dumbledore was the one truly counting on him in this, and Dumbledore was the one who'd helped him so much in the last few months. Disappointing the first adult who truly cared, even if that caring was for purely self-serving reasons, was not a pleasant thought.

He just had to hope that Dumbledore could convince Lily to give him a second chance.

And in the meantime, all he could do was lean on what he'd picked up of Occlumency in the last three weeks, and what latent talent he had for it, and find a way of tamping down his never-ending panic about the situation, his misery at what had transpired, his utter _disbelief_ at what had come out of his mouth.

Because he didn't think of Lily like that, he _didn't_ , the conviction was so adamant in his mind that he knew it was unbreakable. He hated Muggles and he detested Muggle-borns, he even had no problem with the word Mudbl–

His stomach turning gave lie to his words. He almost gagged. He'd never _had_ a problem with it, not until this afternoon. Now the very thought of it brought back Lily's slack, uncomprehending face, the way she'd looked as if he'd physically struck her and that, of everything in the world that she'd imagined might happen, this hadn't been on that list. How that tear had rolled over her eyelid, between the lashes, and blazed a trail down her cheek, and no amount of mental magic or discipline could get him away from it.

In one afternoon, that word had gone from a typical throw-away name, a less than important insult, to one of the words Severus loathed with everything he had within himself, hated it, detested it, despised it. And he knew that he needed to contain that, too, because the people he was going to be associating with in the foreseeable future threw the word around all the time, without thinking twice about it, probably without even properly noticing it, and he couldn't let them know how much the word would infuriate him every single time. It was imperative that they not notice.

So he took deep breaths and tried to build up some sort of mental shields like his book had suggested; Occlumency wasn't like the Patronus Charm, it didn't demand of him to understand his emotions, he just needed to be aware enough of them to box them up and put them in a corner of his mind, behind dams that would hold the worst of it in until he could face them, just until then.

Self-hatred wasn't a new emotion to him; the sense of worthlessness was what had driven him throughout most of his life, the seeds of it planted by his father and watered by his mother, trimmed by the world that made sure he didn't have a single safe place left to call his own, that only ever offered him persecution and duplicity and knowing that he wasn't good enough, not ever. He should have been able to handle it, should have been able to suffer through the self-castigation and the pain that Lily's hatred promised to hold, because he deserved it, for breaking his word that her heritage didn't mean anything (it didn't, it _didn't_! and _So why did you use that word, then?_ in his mother's dismissive, pointed voice), for unleashing his humiliation-fuelled fury on her (why had he let that phrase get to him when he'd even managed to resist the thought that Lily might have smiled, _why_ had he been so weak as to let something as pedestrian as them implying he was a 'damsel in distress' make everything seem so intolerable in that moment?), for hurting her in ways that he'd never imagined himself capable of (that _fucking_ word), for proving her right about him just when he'd decided he wanted her to be wrong.

Putting himself down was something Severus had done since he'd been a small child (it was why he appreciated his Slytherin friends so much, because they saw his worth, they saw it in his knowledge and his smarts and his usefulness, even when he himself didn't), and so doing it now should have felt like a well-tread path, like familiar territory. Except it didn't, because he'd spent days, weeks, months with someone who offered guidance when he felt lost, resolution for his internal conflicts, praise and pride in his skills, an adult who'd perhaps cared about him or at least his prospective use enough to see past his Slytherin crest in spite of the man's own famed bias towards Gryffindor, someone who'd seen his potential when Severus hadn't even known what the word had meant, someone who'd put countless fruitless hours into just listening and speaking with Severus, someone who'd taught him to feel happy again.

This was why he'd hidden himself from all those moments of happiness in his memory, Severus understood. He'd done it to protect himself from even more hurt, but in that, all the hurts had become just the same, until he'd forgotten that they could be different. But he'd allowed himself to dig up every speck of childish wonder and joy that had clung to those old, old memories, every happy, loving one of moments that had grown in the shadow of that darkness of his own making. He'd wanted to feel good, just for a moment or two here and there, just a little bit, and so he'd done it. And this pain now – this gut-tearing, soul-crushing fear and despair that he was feeling now at the thought of Lily never speaking another word to him again, of not forgiving him and letting him make it up to her – that was the pain he'd warded himself against, and now that he'd dismantled those wards, it was a pain worse than almost any he'd felt in years and years.

That was the way things were, though; Severus had learned early on that there was no true cure for this kind of pain. All he could do was let it run him over, or hold out under its pressure until it lessened. Lily would forgive him or she wouldn't, and he knew there was nothing he could do until she told him either way. Lily was that elusive _it_ everyone always spoke about, the _raison d'etre_ for a neglected, unloved, lonely sixteen-year-old boy. But she wasn't the _only_ reason, not anymore. Dumbledore was counting on him, the one adult who'd cared in the last ten years in some way (even if only exploitative), and no matter what else, for _him_ , Severus knew he'd persevere. And the war that loomed on the horizon, it was so much bigger than his miserable life, so much bigger than his sixteen years' worth of mistakes. He didn't know if he disagreed with Voldemort's motives, but he knew that he disagreed with his limits, because those limits rested squarely in a world that didn't have any room for Lily in it, and it wasn't a world Severus could live in. So, whether she forgave him or not, he was going to fight in this war, for the kindness a great man had bestowed on a lost teenager, and for the world that Lily would be proud to be part of.

And that was enough material for Severus to construct his mental dams out of, enough conviction to stand tall against the agony he felt inside for his own mistakes, enough fortitude to face the smugness of his friends and be as duplicitous as any Snake could be.

It took another half an hour, perhaps, before he felt strong enough to stand without shaking, but by then, the torrent of emotion raging within him was forcibly calmed, and he felt in better control than he had in a while. He'd read that properly-done Occlumency could work so far as to completely tamp down emotions, though that was dangerous and complex enough he didn't think he'd done that. But even just compartmentalising it all and pushing it to the side was effective enough, he thought, and it was the best he could do in any case.

Stopping by the bathroom to splash some water in his face and check himself in a mirror – he was pale and he had bruises of exhaustion under his eyes, but on the whole he thought he didn't look so horrid that he'd attract undue attention – Severus returned to the Slytherin Quarters, moving through the Common Room and the hallway leading to the boys' dormitories to slip into his. To his only slight surprise, all the other fifth-year Slytherins were already there, including Felix Jones, the resident loner who often avoided their room like the plague if they were all in it, and Michael Stone, who tended to stay up in the Common Room, whether for avoidance or simply because his best friend was a fourth-year girl. Philes was also not already asleep, though it was nearing midnight, which could only mean one thing – they'd all been waiting for him.

Wonderful.

Severus walked across the room and dropped onto his bed, toeing off his shoes in a hurry; if he could shut himself in his bed, they'd be forced to leave him be, and to tell the truth, he was utterly exhausted. Restful or not, he needed sleep, because everything else aside, there were still O.W.L.s to be taken tomorrow, and he was not looking forward to this one – Transfiguration O.W.L. meant suffering Potter's unbeatable smugness at the one subject the Gryffindor easily trounced pretty much everyone else except Black, and even the very thought of that boy made his stomach twist in discomfort and nerves. His throat still hurt from the coughing, he felt banged up all over, and the disgusting taste of soap still lingered in his mouth even all these hours later (or maybe that was just his mind not letting him forget today's suffering).

"We heard what happened today, Snape," Avery said with a smirk.

"I'm sure you did," Severus replied snidely, reaching to tug his drape closed, and being forced to stop when Mulciber grabbed a handful of it. Severus raised his head to stare at the bigger boy's cold grey eyes in expecting, derisive silence.

"You finally figured out she was nothing but a filthy Mudblood. Took you long enough."

His mental shields withstood against that word, but not without damage. It was all still a bit too fresh.

"Get the fuck out of my face, Mulciber," he snarled.

"I just find it so peculiar, boys," Jones spoke up, voice like a whip, making both Slytherins jerk their heads towards him, "that you think it more important to note on the fact that Snape's broken it off with that Muggle-born, than that I know, for a fact, that at least two of you were in that crowd down by the lake, and did nothing."

"Are you implying something, Jones?" Philes asked, glaring at the red-haired boy.

"What do you think, Philes?"

Jones was a strange bugger, a Slytherin who detested the power games of their House, who was very much against blood purism, but, unlike Michael Stone, prone to declaring it to all the world and sunder. It often felt to Severus like he believed himself the lone voice of reason in the whole of Slytherin, and this belief usually ended up pushing him to stick his nose where it really had no business being.

"I think you're looking for a little one-on-one with us."

Severus locked eyes with Stone, who shook his head minutely. Once upon a time, he'd been willing to bail Jones out of these sorts of situations. Obviously not anymore, though. Avery was capitalising on the rumours flying around the school as to the identity of the attackers, clearly not caring in the least that an Auror investigation was in full progress (no doubt because he relied on Rosier's protection to keep the rest of them from revealing the full extent of the truth to the relevant authorities), which had resulted in everyone in their House being doubly cautious, because no one wanted to end up like those poor sods. Stone knew who was responsible, and while Severus hadn't expected him to say anything, he _had_ expected the dark-skinned boy to at least warn Jones away from these sorts of verbal attacks.

"I'm not afraid of _you_ , Bommy," Jones said, smirking widely; Philes hated that he'd been named after a character from a Muggle literary series, and reminding him that his name was Boromir was not a good idea. So, either Jones had a death wish, or he was confident he could take them on.

Severus was leaning towards the first one, personally, but considering Jones had to have had at least some cunning as to get into Slytherin, he wasn't going to disqualify the second one. It just seemed far too bizarre a behaviour for Severus not to have missed something.

"Really?" Mulciber said, crossing his arms over his chest. "So you don't think we went after to those Mudblood and blood traitor fuckers couple of weeks back? Or you do, and you're aiming for a personal presentation? Do you want to know how _Ignis Ambula_ feels? A little fire under your stinking, Muggle-loving feet?"

"You don't scare me, Mulciber," Jones fired back, shooting to his feet. "And those Mudbloods and blood traitors, as you call them, they're _people_ , they're students like you and me, and they didn't deserve to have the Fire-Walking Curse cast on them, or the Choking Hex, or the–"

"Actually," Philes spoke up with a nasty expression on his face, "it was the Larynx-Crusher Curse. Might want to get your facts straight if you want to do this with us."

"Like it makes a difference," Jones answered with a scoff. "You're all complete pieces of shit, every single one of you, except Stone there, and maybe Snape, in some distant corner of reality. You value nothing; you pretend to be his friends and find nothing strange with standing around, _watching_ , while he gets terrorised by those Gryffindor wankers." Wide-eyed, Severus watched as the boy got more and more winded in his rant, and Mulciber became angrier and angrier in turn. "You all ought to be put in the places of those seventh-years, see how you like suffering the _Fire-Walking Curse_ and the _Larynx -fucking_ _-Crusher Curse_ , and that brain-swelling spell, see how you like suffering some Dark Magic. You know, I heard you need intent for those, I wonder if I have enough intent to cast that on your inbred, _stupid_ , worthless ars–"

"You little fucker," Mulciber thundered, feet eating up the distance between them in two steps, "who are you calling inbred?! _Crucio_!"

Severus barely contained his gasp as the curse hit Jones squarely in the face and he fell to the floor, releasing blood-curdling screams that rang out through the subterranean chambers of the Slytherin House. It was only for the time that it took Thistletwaithe to push Mulciber halfway into a chest and break his hold of the spell, but it was enough to bring pounding feet to their room.

"You fool!" the stocky, gap-toothed boy shot out. "Do you know what you've done?"

Mulciber's nostrils were wide as he stared at the other Pure-blood, reminding of an enraged bull, just as Slughorn burst into their quarters with the sixth- and seventh-year prefects in tow.

"What in the name of Merlin is going on here?!" the fat little Potioneer exclaimed, looking from one to the other. "Prefect Thistletwaithe? I want an answer, now!"

"Mulciber cast the Cruciatus Curse on Jones, sir," Thistletwaithe said without an ounce of hesitation, staring contemptuously at the moron.

"Is this true?"

Severus locked eyes with Stone, Avery and Philes for a moment. Then all four nodded in confirmation.

"Well, I never– Mr Mulciber, your wand, now! You are coming with me to the Headmaster's Office this instant! Rosier, Neggleworth, take Mr Jones to the hospital wing."

"And sir," Avery spoke up before Slughorn had had a chance to leave, "Cain here was also bragging about having attacked those poor seventh-years a couple of weeks back. I believe he specifically said to have used _Ignis Ambula_ , the Fire-Walking Curse, on that girl."

Slughorn's eyes flashed, and he manhandled the big lug that was Mulciber as if he was a firstie, while Mulciber spat curses and threats back at Avery. The three male prefects took Jones, who was on the ground, twitching and moaning, out of the room, presumably to the hospital wing, yelling all the while 'move along' and 'nothing to see here'.

Once everyone was gone, a truly satisfied grin spread over Avery's face.

"Well, I think this calls for a celebration."

"You're really determined to throw Mulciber under the carriage, aren't you, Terence?" Philes said with a shake of his head.

"Well, when the opportunity falls into your lap..." Avery said with a shrug. "Besides, he'd have been expelled by the end of tomorrow anyway, and this way, there'll be no more Aurors sniffing about, stumbling all over the Dark Lord's business here at Hogwarts. And if he knows what's good for him – which he does – he'll admit the allegations and keep us out of it," he added darkly.

"What did he ever do to you, Avery?" Stone asked, and even he was a little incredulous.

"He got in my way," the boy answered ruthlessly. "And in the process, he hurt my sister in ways that are none of your fucking business. It's his funeral that he's just _that_ dumb not to see the trap he'd set for himself. All I did was poke the shutting mechanism. Now, whaddaya say, boys? I reckon I can find us a bottle of firewhiskey around here somewhere."

Philes followed after him – clearly, he was willing to get over Avery's past actions, though that was relatively par for the course, really, especially with Mulciber fully out of the picture now – but Severus didn't, and Stone stayed put, as well, both trying to process what had happened.

"Why was he goading them like that? Jones, I mean," Severus asked finally, looking at the dark-skinned boy on the other bed.

"You don't know, do you? Jones is an orphan. Half-blood, but he landed in a Muggle group home when he was eight. Fairlot, the Hufflepuff that you lot attacked – not the Head Boy, the other one – he's from that group home, too, has been a sort of brother figure to Jones since they were kids, made sure to keep the social care from ever separating them if they had to move. You didn't think you were the only one with ties to people from Houses that aren't Slytherin or Ravenclaw, did you?" he added at Severus' dawning look. "I let him know Dumbledore's hands were tied, he decided to find a way of getting some information Dumbledore could use to get justice for Fairlot. I understood him to be planning to provoke them until they let something slip, but I suppose this is even better. If Mulciber had used anything other than an Unforgivable, it'd be questionable, but this? Avery's right; he'll be locked up by tomorrow morning. Avery played it masterfully."

Feeling a little gobsmacked, Severus tried to slot himself into this new reality where Felix Jones, the biggest loner of their year, the most prickly student in the Slytherin House, was that close to a Hufflepuff that he'd suffer the Cruciatus for him.

"I didn't..."

"Not all Slytherins are so obsessed with blood purity and sadism as you and your friends, Severus," Stone said with a shake of his head. "I thought you were different than them, I always prided myself on being a good judge of character. But I suppose I was wrong about that this time around."

He was, perhaps, but Severus promised himself that he'd change it. One way or another, he was not going to end up like any of those guys, who actively searched for ways of stabbing each other in the back and laughing at each other's expense.

He was done with all of this.

* * *

On Tuesday morning Lily chose to skip breakfast, because she felt utterly horrible, swollen and aching, her eyes stinging terribly from all the crying she'd done the day before and the near-sleepless night she'd come out of. She felt completely emotionally incapable of dealing with what she knew would be loud gossip, at least among the female section of the Gryffindor table. Mary, Bettina and Clotilde had managed to keep everyone away from her for most of the previous afternoon, and had been kind enough to not question her beyond demanding to know what she'd told Severus after he'd come to apologise, but she didn't trust the others to be as considerate.

She also had no real clue how to handle either Potter's group or Severus. The very thought of it tied her stomach into knots, Severus' desperate plea echoing in her mind and overlapping with those words that still made her ill – _filthy little Mudbloods like her_ – and her fury with the Marauders had not been in the least appeased by Remus' apology the previous night. She'd always thought the expression 'heartache' to be metaphorical, and only now did she understand why it had arisen in the first place – her chest ached, physically ached, to the point where she felt the urge to rub at her breastbone to relieve it, having not let up since last afternoon, and the worst part of it was that every time she thought about doing something to deal with it, trying to find a way to move past it, she only felt utterly demotivated, because _why was she even supposed to try?_

There was anger, too, boiling under the surface, making everything worse, anger at Potter and Black for being such horrible human beings, at Remus for having pretended nothing had been happening, at Peter and the rest of the spectators for having egged it on, and most of all, at Severus for showing his true colours and breaking her heart in the process. After her sobbing spell had dulled the sharp edge of pain, that anger had risen up to carry her through the practical portion of the exam, and she'd held onto it for dear life, because it was better to be angry with the boys than to give into despondency and pain, so that by the time Mary had come to tell her Severus was threatening to sleep outside the Common Room, that inner fury was kindled to such an extent that Lily saw nothing wrong with causing as much pain to him as he'd caused her.

She'd done it in the only way she knew would truly hurt him more than anything else – by pretending that she didn't care. It was a simple decision, to cause pain as deep as the one that had been caused her to the one who'd caused it. She hadn't even needed to think about how to do it, really; showing him with that icy exterior that she'd drawn around herself like a protective cloak that his actions had caused her to stop caring for him completely would have played off everything she meant to him, would have cut to the quick, like that word – _filthy little Mudblood_ – had cut her insides to ribbons.

And the loathing she'd felt for herself afterwards, when he'd broken her _again_ , when he'd made her utterly forget where she was, made her scream at him for half the Gryffindor Tower to hear, it had kept her up throughout the night. Hatred for being such a lousy actress, for not being strong enough to keep up the act from start to finish. Hatred for not being capable of turning that act into truth. He'd broken her, and she'd screamed and cried and he'd looked miserable for it but there had been hope there at the very end, in his voice and in his eyes, in the way he'd reached with his long, stained fingers for her, when he'd begged her to speak with the Headmaster, and for that, she hated him, too, because she'd not been able to find one little speck of hope within herself where he had, and the unfairness of it had only made the hurt worse.

So, really, appetite was mostly just an abstract concept to her on Tuesday morning, and skipping breakfast seemed like a simple trade-off for just a bit more time to hide. It allowed her some more time to review before their Transfigurations exam, though her head felt like it was full of cotton and molasses, and her eyes stung quite horribly.

That was why, even though Mulciber's expulsion and detainment had spread through the school like Fiendfyre, Lily ended up being one of the last to find out, when she finally went down for the exam and met up with Mary, Bettina and Clotilde, where Bettina explained it all in excited undertones while Clotilde forced a large cup of coffee into Lily hands (and no matter how much Lily disliked coffee, even she was capable of admitting to herself that she needed a caffeine boost) and Mary insisted on checking her appearance and keeping everyone away from their group through a somewhat impressive air of causal unapproachability.

Lily didn't know _what_ to do with that information, though; she'd always known that Mulciber was not a good person, and being vindicated about it should have given her some sense of satisfaction with respect to her arguments with Severus, but she just couldn't quite muster the emotion for it, not least because the rumours were that he'd also admitted to attacking Clara and her friends, and if Mulciber had been involved, then had the other Slytherins been, too? Had _Severus_?

That wasn't something she could afford to think about just minutes before having to sit for the hardest exams of her Hogwarts career so far – an exam that, it turned out, she did quite disastrously by her own standards. Felix Jones was there, showing minor signs of intermittent tremors which only fuelled the hushed gossipy conversation as everyone found their seats and the examiners took the time to hand out the parchments and quills. The exam itself was probably only average in difficulty compared to all the others, but Lily had a hard time focusing, and kept forgetting minor things she knew she'd need to get a high grade, so that by the end of the exam, she felt that she'd be lucky to get Exceeds Expectations, let alone an Outstanding.

And she couldn't even muster the energy to care, which made her hate herself, Severus, the Marauders and the whole damn world even more.

Clotilde was waiting outside the Great Hall, and as soon as Lily emerged, she linked their arms together and pulled her away from the crowd and the other two Gryffindors.

"Stop thinking about it," she instructed. "You'll fix it on the practical portion."

"Clo..."

"Come on, I know just what will get you out of your head for the afternoon."

The blue-haired witch pulled her in the opposite direction to the mass of fifth- and seventh-year students until they caught up with a lonely figure wheeling herself in her chair. Clotilde greeted Clara with a wave and, without any hint of small-talk, began fairly interrogating her about what the hell had happened in the Slytherin quarters last night. To Lily's surprise, Clara didn't seem put off by Clotilde's forceful, blunt demeanour, but instead regarded the Gryffindor sixth-year in gentle amusement.

Of course, then she explained about the connection between Jones and Jasper, and why Jones had done what he'd done, and things suddenly began making so much more sense.

"Stupid little bugger," Clara said with a fond smile that Lily found completely incongruous with the talk about their year's biggest weirdo. "But he adores Jasper, and Jasper's always seen him as a kid brother. He was incandescent when he'd learned that Jasper might not be able to speak properly again, and it hit him really hard that they'd managed to wipe the whole thing out of our minds."

"You still don't remember anything?"

Clara shook her head. "No, and as it's not come back by now, it's unlikely that we'll ever remember."

"What did Dumbledore say?"

The seventh-year Ravenclaw shrugged. "What could he have said? We were all interviewed by Aurors weeks ago, and this morning, he confirmed that Mulciber had confessed to doing it; he said Terence Avery was with him at the time, but at this point, it's just his word against Avery's, and there's not much they can do about it except maybe implement Veritaserum, but since he's a Pure-blood minor and has confessed, that will not happen. We're of the opinion that Mulciber isn't lying, in fact, we think their other friends were involved as well, possibly some of the upper-years, but it's not something we can prove either way."

"Oh, I _hate_ them," Lily said, clenching her fists in her lap. "Those awful, _awful_ boys."

"You know, Lis, no offence meant, but Snape's been milling about that crowd for years, so... good riddance, really," Clotilde pointed out. "I mean, if there's even a chance that he was involved, as well..."

"Yeah..." she said, though far more quietly, trying so very hard not to think about any of it. "Yeah, you're right," came out of her mouth, a lie given voice without conscious thought – it didn't feel like she was right to Lily, not at all. In fact, it felt wrong in all the worst ways. But Lily didn't feel capable of dealing with that conundrum now, and so had shied away from it almost instinctively, though one thought kept echoing faintly despite everything: Severus _wouldn't have_... would he?

Clara was the one who broke the silence in the end, offering Clotilde a friendly smile before turning her eyes to Lily.

"Would you two terribly mind pushing me back to the hospital wing? I find that my arms aren't nearly as strong as I'd thought before... this."

"Of– Of course," Lily said, snapping out of her head and turning her eyes to her friend. "Clo?"

"You go," Clotilde said with a small shooing motion and a grin, "and I'll head back and see if Betts needs some help with revising before your practical."

"Oh, she does, but I think Mary might need your help more," Lily replied. "Bettina is more liable to drive her crazy by this afternoon than to fail the practical portion."

Clotilde snorted lightly and waved, before hurrying down the corridor in the opposite direction of the hospital wing that Lily and Clara took, Lily grabbing hold of the wheelchair handles to push the older girl in front of herself.

"So, how have your O.W.L.s been so far?"

They chatted about exams for the ten or so minutes it took them to get back, Lily throwing herself into what was essentially just meaningless chit-chat with abandon. When they arrived, none of the others were at the hospital wing, and Clara directed Lily towards the very farthest part of the long room. There, behind several large privacy screens, Clara had what looked like almost an actual room set up.

"Amir and Jasper are in the Hufflepuff quarters, but it would have been just too complicated for me to move back into the Ravenclaw Tower for the few weeks I have left," Clara explained, reaching her hand upwards to grab hold of Lily's shoulders while the red-head helped her transfer from the chair to the bed without putting any pressure on her bandaged feet. It was awkward movement, somewhat clumsy, but ultimately effective enough that Clara could properly seat herself and lift her legs up on a mound of pillows at the foot of the bed. "Thank you. In any case, my feet need regular redressing, so Madam Pomfrey suggested that I just stay here."

"Too bad there aren't any proper rooms here for patients," Lily noted, looking around the rather open hall that served the medicinal purpose.

"There are, but those are for quarantine purposes, in cases of contagious diseases. Dragon pox and such. Madam Pomfrey needs to have them available at all times. And this isn't so bad, either; there are privacy wards so that I wouldn't disturb anyone else, or they wouldn't disturb me, and all I'm doing is revising for my N.E.W.T.s anyway."

"Well, so long as you can do it in peace," Lily agreed, shouldering her bag a little more comfortably. "I'll see you tomorrow, yeah?"

"Of course. Lily, before you leave, may I ask you a question, regarding the incident yesterday?"

Giving the Ravenclaw a wary look, Lily stopped in her step and waited in anxious silence.

"What Clotilde mentioned... _do_ you believe your Slytherin friend may have been involved with the attack on us?"

Inhaling sharply, Lily felt her hear pick up its rhythm at her own secret thoughts voiced out loud so plainly. She wanted to immediately deny it, to say that Severus would never do such a thing, but...

She couldn't, not really, because Mulciber and Avery had done it, and they were people he called his friends, along with those other two Pure-blood Slytherins from their year, and it was enough to cause doubt. She didn't _want_ to believe he'd be capable of it, but that was also a falsehood, because he was more than capable, on the intellectual as well as emotional level.

"I... don't know," she answered in the end, wiping her sweaty palms on her robes-clad hips. "From what he'd told me, Mulciber and Avery have connections to Rosier. I'd... assume... that it was the seventh-years who'd done it, and Mulciber and Avery were the ones to take the blame."

"Because of the level of magic used," Clara confirmed. "Yes, I'm inclined to agree. Amir, however, is sceptical."

"Why? I mean..."

"His father has connections in the Ministry, and so he has better information than the rest of us." The older girl leaned forward a little towards the edge of the bed. "Lily, you offered your help to us. Does the offer still stand?"

"Yes, of course. However I can help."

"Would you be willing to meet with us tomorrow afternoon, then? Amir would like to discuss this with you given your perhaps unique perspective about these Slytherins, and I think you agree with me that _all_ responsible should be punished, not just Mulciber."

Swallowing past her dry throat – she didn't know _what_ to do about Severus, but she did know she didn't want to see him expelled or worse – Lily agreed. She wasn't sure if Amir Shafiq truly thought that she could be of some help, or if he was simply grasping at straws, but either way, there was never any other answer she would have given anyway, not only because it was another chance in what was a rapidly dwindling pool of them to perhaps convince them to invite into Dumbledore's student group they were leading (because she was quite sure by now that they _were_ , in fact), but also because a small, soft part of her felt like she needed to keep an eye out on the situation for Severus' benefit.

Walking back towards the Great Hall for lunch, Lily had a fleeting thought that it felt like they were expecting her to buy her way in, and that, now that she'd so publically broken off her friendship with Severus, she wasn't as undesirable to them as she'd been at Easter. She didn't know quite how to feel about that, but then that was also true for most other things right about now, and so letting her mind slip away from it and back to the matter of her abysmal performance on the O.W.L. today didn't require any effort at all.

In fact, it felt the opposite of burdensome – it felt horrifyingly relieving.

* * *

As Tuesday dawned, and crawled on and became Wednesday, and then turned into Thursday, Remus made sure not to be anywhere near James, Sirius and Peter, so that by Friday, James was beginning to fret, because Saturday evening was the full moon, and Remus, when they caught sight of him in the examination hall, looked more and more shattered.

Sirius was too pissed off to worry about it, though. If Remus thought of them as wannabe murderers, as psychopaths, then he could damn well find better friends than them, like Little Miss I-know-best Lily sodding Evans, who couldn't keep her pert nose out of other people's business and was determined to impose her opinion on everyone.

At least James had cooled slightly, after she'd forced him to spend twenty minutes vomiting slugs, though he looked ecstatic by the fact that Evans had stopped being friends with Snivellus, and so publically, too. Sirius didn't give two shits about them one way or another; in his opinion, they deserved each other.

And besides, he had bigger concerns to worry about, like the letter Regulus had gotten from their mother, that he'd, for once, been willing to share. The Wretched Woman had written to his brother (not to him, mind, just the good son) that their father had had a heart attack. Nothing too serious, according to her, but the very fact that she'd written to Regulus about it implied things neither of them particularly liked.

Sirius' relationship with his baby brother was not a good one, and he had no interest in improving it one whit. The Wretched Woman was obviously determined to kill Sirius one of these days, so that Regulus could become the Black Heir, and Regulus knew to milk that to the last drop; he followed the family traditions, supported their parents' views, and was generally the perfect son they'd always wanted, which only made things that much worse for Sirius.

And the fact that their father had been ordered to take it easy, lest he not end up keeling over dead, was going to make things ten times worse once they got home. So yes, compared to that, Remus' little hissy fit did not quite register on Sirius' radar, discounting the fact that it was obviously affecting James.

"He'll need us tomorrow," James said once they exited the examination hall after the written portion of the Herbology exam on Friday.

"Why would I bloody care?" Sirius shot back, giving him an annoyed look. "He's the one who said he didn't condone our... what was it... oh, yes, murderous tendencies."

"I know," James agreed, huffing in understanding. "But still... I mean, we've not missed a single full moon since the first time we went with him."

"Yes, for which he was so grateful as to blame us for the near misses. It's not like we were going to help him during the summer, either."

"I don't know," Peter fretted. "It doesn't seem fair."

The sun blinded him momentarily as they found their way to the wide expanse of the Hogwarts' green grounds, and Sirius felt a growl build up in his throat involuntarily. He didn't even try to suppress it.

"What doesn't, that he gets to insult us in this way and then we turn around and _still_ do this for him?"

James took a moment to ruffle his hair and give some smiles to a group of sixth-year witches they passed on their way to the lake, his armpit a little dark from perspiration – it was so sodding _hot_ , and the summer hadn't even started yet – before turning back to the discussion.

"You know, I wouldn't have expected you to be talking like this. I mean, yes, I'm angry with him just as much as you, but–"

"But what? We don't act the way he wants us to, he breaks off our friendship? Where's the loyalty, Prongs? Five years, and they obviously mean nothing to him."

"But maybe we ought to at least–"

"What, Peter?" he snapped, and the pudgy boy nearly tripped over a rock concealed in the grass. "Think about what he said? He practically compared us to _Death Eaters_! And he point-blank said we were as bad as _Slytherins_. Those slimy, corrupt, vile snakes. And then _he_ walked away from _us_."

To that, neither had much to say. Sirius walked forcefully past the lake towards Hagrid's house, and his two friends had to almost run to catch up to him.

"Where're you going, then?"

"I need to run," he told James. "You cover for me? I'll be back in a jiff."

"So long as you're there for the practical exam," James said with a shrug. "Want us with?"

"No."

So they kept watch while Sirius shifted into Padfoot and sprinted off into the Forbidden Forest, senses so much sharper than they were in his human form. The smell of rotting leaves and fragrant flowers, the interplay of shadows and light filtering its way through the leaves, the surrealism of a world without true reds and greens, all yellow and blue and violet and shades inbetween, the sound of birds chirping and rodents scurrying underfoot, the distant presence of magic inherent in the dark creatures lurking deep within.

Like this, the world became manageable again, simple, because for dogs, there was little to no past, and no future, there was only now, and no matter the fact that he wasn't actually a dog, that he was a human, a wizard, the simplicity of thought that was the animal always enveloped him like a comforting embrace, so that, at least for a little while, the world wasn't so complicated and fucked up.

He dared only stay in the Forest for ten or fifteen minutes, but even that time helped him find his balance a little. Remus' betrayal stung, especially because he was already a nervous wreck about the summer holidays and what his father's illness would mean for him, that he just didn't know how to move past it and forgive.

In the end, he turned his head away from Remus' disappointed, hurt eyes and thought to himself that this was all his fault anyway, and Evans', too, for putting such idiotic ideas in his head. He remained firmly planted on his bed that Saturday evening, and managed to talk James out of his ridiculous guilt, only noticing that he'd forgotten about Peter sometime in the middle of the night when he realised that the third boy wasn't with them. James had probably gotten him to go in his stead, though what Wormtail could even do against the enormous werewolf, Sirius couldn't guess. Maybe play chase-the-rat. That'd be a nice lesson to the pudgy boy about the dangers of doing things contrary to the general consensus, he decided as he fell into unsettled, haunting sleep (and if there was the sound of rustling sheets and footsteps in the deadest hour of the night, well Sirius was far too out of it to notice, or notice the empty dorm, for that matter, either).

Regulus insisted that Sirius meet with him in one of the empty classrooms on Sunday, and so he went even before James and Peter had properly woken up. His brother was there, of course, looking a little tired and quite unhappy, dressed in his casual robes and with his hair tied back, the way that Wretched Woman always insisted was the proper way (because, naturally, Sirius only ever wore it loose).

"What is it you wanted to speak with me about?" he asked the squirt with a lift of his eyebrow. Regulus was only a year younger, but he'd not hit his growth spurt yet, and that year looked very much like two or three between them right now.

"Look, Siri," Regulus began, jumping off the desk to stand in front of him, "can you at least try not to aggravate Mother so much when we get home?"

"Why, so that you'd not have to listen to her screeching?"

Regulus huffed and crossed his arms over his chest. "I just... you only have a year left, then you can go and never come back."

"You'd like that, wouldn't you, Reg? Get to be her precious boy without the big prodigal brother around."

"Would you stop this? Please."

Frowning, Sirius inspected him.

"What's happened, then?"

"She wrote again," he confessed. "You know that Cissy's getting married in August, right?"

Their cousin Narcissa, to Lucius sodding Malfoy of all people.

"Yes, and?"

"Well, Mother's insisted that she be married out of Grimmauld Place by the family tradition, and the Malfoys don't have any large properties in the London area, which means that most of our closer family will be staying with us. Including Cousin Bellatrix and her husband–"

"Oh," Sirius said as it came to him what Regulus was implying. "And I'm guessing you want to impress her, is that it? Pave the way for when you actually get to join Voldemort?"

"Uncle Alphard is too sick to come," Regulus said flatly, and Sirius' stomach dropped into his shoes. "That's why I asked you to try and not make trouble when we get home. Mother will be far too busy with Aunt Druella getting everything ready for the wedding, and you know those two are Kneazles and Crups when they have to work together, especially because Cousin Dromeda went and ran off to marry that Mudblood, and managed to both piss off Mother and completely dash Aunt Druella's last wedding planning. And this time, Father can't be maintaining order because he's supposed to be taking it easy, and you know Uncle Cyggy would rather drown himself in his own firewhiskey than get in the middle of their fights. It'll be a complete madhouse, and with Uncle Alph not there, the first time you do something to piss her off, you'll get _all of it_. Now, excuse me for having a smidgeon of concern for my big brother, as it's obviously unappreciated and I shouldn't have bothered, but I thought you ought to know this before actually getting home."

"Wait, Reggie," Sirius said with a sigh, rubbing his eyes with his fingers and pretending not to see frustrated tears in his brother's eyes. "Thank you for the warning, I'll keep it in mind, all right?"

"Good," Regulus said, looking honestly relieved. "I'll try and cover for you as much as I can, yeah?"

Sirius shrugged. "Sure, whatever."

"Look, Siri, I just..."

But he fell silent, and when Sirius frowned and asked him what he'd meant to say, Regulus just shook his head and went for the door, leaving Sirius with the thoughts of a summer filled with Blacks and Blacks, not to mention a few Death Eaters, and none of them even remotely on his side.

It was going to be hell.

* * *

By Wednesday, the anger that had sustained Lily for the first twenty-four hours after the incident was mostly spent, leaving in its wake complete numb weariness that dulled the whole world around her. She'd slept badly, but at least she'd gotten a few hours of sleep, and the one positive thing in all of it was that she felt a bit more capable of focusing on the exams again. She still didn't know if she'd go to Dumbledore or not, and her practical Transfigurations exam had gone almost as badly as the written portion, so it was comparatively easy to take that as justification to put everything regarding Severus on hold until Friday afternoon. Instead, she focused on clearing her mind enough to do the remaining exams better, and the distraction her girlfriends provided was marvellous in assisting those efforts – considering the fact that the summer was shaping up to be swelteringly hot this year, Clotilde had suggested the three fifth-year Gryffindors come stay with her at her family's cottage by the sea for a week or two, and the currently spirited debate over breakfast on when they could do it and whether they could get Alice to join them for it was keeping Lily's mind fully away from her own woes.

In fact, she was so intent on distracting herself that she didn't even notice Remus standing awkwardly above and behind her at the Gryffindor table, clearly wishing to speak with her but not sure how to begin the conversation. It was only Mary's pointed look that actually made her notice him. Blinking, she looked up at him, not feeling in a generous mood towards him in spite of his apology on Monday evening; Potter had already made an attempt to approach her, which her friends had been good enough to block most forcefully, because otherwise she'd have used him as an outlet, and as she'd already gotten away with cursing him and Black once, she doubted McGonagall would be so lenient a second time.

"Would... you mind if I, erm... sat with you?" he asked hesitantly, green eyes flittering over her friends before returning to her. Lily frowned, turning her head towards Remus' friends in mild confusion; Potter seemed to be making a statement out of ignoring them, Black was sending both her and Remus hostile, furious looks, and Peter appeared to be quite focused on picking his own food.

"Is something wrong?"

"You haven't heard?" Bettina, who was sitting right next to Lily on the bench, hissed in her ear. "They're fighting."

Remus, whose lycanthropy-enhanced senses meant he'd quite easily heard her, responded by dropping his shoulders and hunching into himself. Lily chose not to even pretend he'd not heard the plump witch.

"What's happened?"

"We fought," Remus answered, one shoulder rising in a sort of aborted half-shrug. "On Monday evening, before we spoke. I... you were right." It wasn't hard to hear what he wasn't saying – he was currently an undesirable in that group because apparently he'd actually stood up to them.

Sighing, Lily scooted over and Remus' expression was that of relief and gratefulness mired in misery. She'd have to question him properly about this later, when Betts, Mary and Clo weren't there to hear, but if Remus really was going to stick to this – stick to standing up to his friends – then Lily was going to support him in it, because it meant he was trying to be a better human being, unlike Severus who'd apparently fallen into the very pit of darkness she'd been trying to keep him from.

She tried to include him in her group's conversation, with less than stellar results, as Bettina and Mary seemed a little uncomfortable with him, while Clotilde appeared more interested in Lily's and Remus' friendship than in whatever they were talking about. Still, at least having to work the group meant she was not thinking about the invisible pink hippogriff sitting at the base of her spine and reminding her just how miserable she was still feeling, so she took it as a positive.

The practical portion of the Astronomy O.W.L. was scheduled for after nightfall, which meant that she had the afternoon free. She found Clara, Amir and Jasper in the Ravenclaw's little part of the hospital wing, and they seemed to have primarily been waiting for her, because they started in on what amounted to grilling her about everything and anything she knew about the Slytherins. She tried to remember everything she'd caught or overheard in the last year, though even her anger and hurt weren't enough to make her smear Severus in their eyes; every time she almost thought about it, his strange insistence that she talk with Dumbledore came back, and the more she spoke with the seventh-years, the more convinced she became that something more was at stake, something she didn't know the first thing about.

"What will happen with the case against Mulciber?" she asked after the three other students seemed satisfied.

"He'll most likely be tried as a minor, as he's sixteen," Amir answered. "Beyond that, it's still too early to tell what will happen. There are far too many factors to take into account, but for now, my father is doing everything he possibly can to see that little monster prosecuted to the highest extent of the law, both for the attack on us and for using the Cruciatus on Felix, including attempting to have him legally treated as an adult, since he's less than six months away from majority."

"We're doubtful that'll happen, though," Clara said with a shake of her head.

"Do you think he'll give the others up?"

"Not if you ask me," Amir said darkly. "By confessing in addition to being a minor, he's shielded from questioning under Veritaserum and other methods of forcible extraction of information, and you can be certain that this right of his will be rigorously defended from any and all requests by either our solicitors or the Wizengamot. Even his implication of Avery will most likely amount to nothing. My opinion is that he was a predetermined patsy set up to take the fall for this."

"Does that mean you think he didn't do it?"

"Oh, no, of that I have no doubt," the darker-skinned boy answered, nodding his head. "However, I'm also quite certain that this was part of a larger effort by the pro-Voldemort factions within Hogwarts. Whether this was what they'd wanted to accomplish, or if things went wrong, that I can't say. However, Mulciber will be tried for taking the fall one way or another, and he buys this protection by keeping silent. He'll probably do some years in Azkaban, his wand will be broken, and when he's released, he'll be accepted back just in time to be a soldier in their army. He will most certainly be imprisoned, if for nothing else, then for targeting another minor with an Unforgivable, which is corroborated by _Priori Incantatem_ and five witnesses, including the heir to one of the members of the Sacred Twenty-Eight."

"Incidentally, the same person Mulciber is trying to implicate as his partner," Clara added, "which will help in discrediting the idea that Avery's also responsible for attacking us – it'll be easily explained as him doing it purposefully because Avery will testify against him about the Cruciatus."

"And the rest go free," Lily muttered, shaking her head in disgust.

Jasper snapped his fingers a few times to draw her attention, before writing in the air with his wand. _Why do you care?_

Seeing her confusion, Clara explained. "He means more than we'd expect from those who aren't our friends. Most have been quite appeased by everything that's happened with Mulciber."

Lily frowned at the two seventh-years, wondering what sort of people they spent their time with, if they felt such a question in any way necessary. "I care because it's not right, none of it. Mulciber takes all the blame while others go free, and no one gives a crap about it? What sort of world is this, that such things can happen and no one bats an eyelash? That they can hurt people with token consequences for their chosen scapegoat? It's not _right_ , or just, or even acceptable, and if none of us care about it in the first place, then nothing will ever get done to fix the system! So, that's why I care – because it's the right thing to do, and not just for you guys, but for everyone. If the system were better, You-Know-Who wouldn't have had any foothold to even start this horrid campaign of his, let alone make it what it is today!"

Jasper gave her a small smile and turned to Amir, who nodded.

"Clara has spoken to Alice Ainsworth; Alice speaks highly of you, and so do Frank Longbottom and Emmeline Vance. So, given their recommendations and what the three of us have discussed among ourselves, we'd like to extend to you an invitation."

Lily blinked in momentary surprise as her sluggish brain registered that this was what she'd been going after since Easter hols; months of effort, but she'd apparently finally earned their trust enough to get a chance to fight for what was right.

"As you've obviously deduced for yourself, we are part of a group of like-minded students who are very much against what Voldemort and his Death Eaters stand for, and we believe that open war is imminent."

"I suppose you can think of us as a club of sorts," Clara said. "We meet and talk about the political situation, about our plans for the future and how we can help the war effort. We study some advanced magic together, and exchange ideas and opinions about creating something new, as well. We like to keep it quiet for obvious reasons, so you really can't tell any of your friends, but we keep our big meetings to only a few times a year anyway; it shouldn't take up too much of your time."

 _What do you say?_ Jasper wrote out in the air.

"Yes," Lily almost blurted out, drawing herself to her full height and feeling a bubbling sense of pleasure and satisfaction rise up, momentarily overcoming the gloom of the last three days. It felt _good_ , immediately, and it felt like her thoughts were finally clear and buoyant as they'd been before that mess on Monday. "Yes, of course, yes. Thank you, for the opportunity. Really. I won't let you down."

"We're glad to hear you say so," Amir answered, finally cracking a smile of his own. "Welcome to our group."

* * *

Amir, Clara and Jasper left the proper introductions for after the exams, so Lily didn't get to meet anyone else who was in their secret group in the following days. They explained how the group worked – they met all together only during hectic periods of the school year when there was less chance of being noticed, and otherwise kept to their pre-established study groups so as not to draw attention. Either one or several seventh-years always took over the running of the group from the previous leaders who were leaving Hogwarts, and as Lily had guessed, Amir and Clara were this year's leaders. Dumbledore was aware of them, but by mutual agreement, both he and the group kept away from each other, because due to his political position as head of the Wizengamot, as well as the administrative position within Hogwarts, he couldn't be seen as recruiting students in any way to his cause.

Lily thought that rather smart, though privately perhaps a little disappointing.

More importantly for herself, though, was the fact that her good mood from being invited to participate carried over into the next couple of days. It was as if with just this one sentence, the secretive, reserved group of acquaintances she'd made had managed to help her breathe properly after what seemed like an eternity, and this was exactly what she needed to clear the fog of confusion and pain that had stifled her thought process. By the time she went to her practical portion of the Astronomy O.W.L., Lily had decided that she'd speak with the Headmaster on Friday and settle the whole thing properly. There were two more days of O.W.L.s to contend with, and she wasn't going to let what happened with her Transfiguration O.W.L. repeat itself, because one thing was very obvious to her now – the world was far bigger than her little microcosm at Hogwarts, and she could not afford to ignore it for anything. No matter what was going on between her and Severus, her own future would always come first, and that meant acing her O.W.L.s, getting into the higher education program of her choosing, and figuring out a way to properly involve herself with their world's politics beyond what still amounted to an extracurricular club. Those things, she know, no one could ever take away from her, and so those were the things she needed to build her future on, not her tumultuous relationships with childhood best friends.

When she knocked on the Headmaster's door on Friday afternoon, the old wizard appeared to be writing a missive of some sort. He offered her a smile as he placed the quill into the inkwell and laced his fingers on the desk.

"Ah, Miss Evans. How may I help you this fine afternoon?"

"Hullo, sir," she said softly, feeling suddenly hesitant as she approached him and seated herself across from him. "I'm sorry to bother you."

"You are no bother, I assure you." The Headmaster inclined his head and gave her a knowing look. "I assume you are here about Mr Snape?"

"You know he told me to come speak with you?"

"I do. He has informed me of the... misstep, that happened on Monday."

"Is that what it was? A misstep?"

Merlin, but did this man take _anything_ seriously? Black's attempted murder was a harmless prank, and Severus showing his true colours and proving that he would always be bigoted against her was a _misstep_?

The old wizard sighed.

"Severus told you to come speak with me because he feared that you would break off your friendship, under the assumption that his thoughtlessly spoken insult would convince you of his worthlessness, and when he confided in me on this, I instructed him to direct you to me."

"Why?"

"Because I know how important you and your friendship are to him. Moreover, I know that he and this friendship are important to you; if they weren't, you would not have barged into my office several months ago, ready to fight for justice in his name."

"And I'm here," she said defensively, disliking the way he almost seemed to be attacking her. "What is it you wanted to tell me?"

"In March, after you learned of the incident regarding Mr Snape and Mr Lupin, I spoke with Severus about the direction he sees his life taking. He expressed his indecisiveness on this matter, and we met regularly until several weeks ago in order to help him make a decision. What I wanted to tell you, Miss Evans, is that Severus has, in fact, agreed to work with me now and in the future."

That... couldn't have been what it had sounded like. Frowning, Lily unconsciously sat up a little straighter, locking eyes with Dumbledore's blue ones behind half-moon glasses.

"You mean, against You-Know-Who?"

"That is precisely what I mean," Dumbledore confirmed. "Now, his position as part of Mr Avery's group allows him access to certain circles and information that are, of course, very valuable to our cause, which is why he has remained in close contact with them."

"You mean, he's spying on them for you," she translated, incredulous. "Sev is?"

"Yes, he is." Lily's mind went a little cottony as shock washed over her, and she felt absolutely floored, completely stunned at this new information. Severus, whom she'd accused of choosing those Death Eater wannabes, _spying for Dumbledore_ instead? "In light of th–"

"How?!" she blurted out, then smacked her hand over her mouth when it caught up with her that she'd interrupted one of the most powerful wizards of their world. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean... I just, how did you get him to–"

Dumbledore lifted one wrinkled hand in the air to stop her impending clumsy litany.

"That is not my answer to give, Miss Evans; I am certain Mr Snape would be open to sharing the details with you, but I will not break his confidence on this. Now, as I was saying, in light of his commitment, expecting him to change his behaviour, especially on the points of blood purity, is... unwise, and, whether you and I like it or not, the word 'Mudblood' is part of that vernacular. I cannot speak as to the reasons why he used that word during the incident, other than to say that I believe it was not meant towards you personally, but rather in the context of its wider meaning and simple habit of use. Mr Snape has been adamant about the fact that he has no problem with your magical background from the first conversation we shared."

"But that's not the point," she found herself arguing, latching onto an old point of contention, "he shouldn't have a problem with _any_ Muggle-born, not just me because I'm his friend."

"He is aware of that," Dumbledore assured her, "but these things take time, Miss Evans. And, do not forget that habits are often very had to break."

"Did you even speak with him about it?" she asked, perhaps a little more sharply than necessary.

Dumbledore inclined his head.

"Perhaps not to the level that would satisfy you, no. However, in light of his decision, we will be meeting regularly. You have my assurance that I will address this and other relevant points in due course, Miss Evans. But this situation requires patience. Patience and consideration that need time. The position he has chosen is a delicate one that will demand your understanding, perhaps more than you have been willing to give so far."

It sounded quite pointed, that last sentence, but Lily paid it little mind, as the reveal Dumbledore had made finally sank in fully and the weight of it settled around her like a heavy blanket; her mind kept circling back to the fact that Severus had _chosen_ , and he'd chosen the Light, he'd chosen Dumbledore and her. She'd asked him, and he'd said – she remembered it, she did – he'd said that he'd chosen, but that it wasn't what she'd assumed, and now Albus Dumbledore himself was giving her confirmation.

"I... I really thought he'd... I mean, to think that he'd agreed to..."

"Do not underestimate your influence on him, nor your importance in his life," Dumbledore urged her, "for it is great indeed. And, for everyone's sake, I implore you to seek forgiveness for his transgression in your heart."

All she could do – all there _was_ to do – was nod.

* * *

 **A/N:** Firstly, a big and continuous 'thank you' to Moon999 for going through the chapter and giving me some small pointers on how to improve it; getting an objective opinion and criticism before publishing is definitely an excellent experience, even if you, like me, don't need a grammar beta. Moon999, you're awesome!

That said, a bit more information on Sirius' family: Regulus, as I'm sure everyone knows, is Sirius' younger brother; their parents are Orion and Walburga Black, both Black by birth, though Orion's is the main branch; they're third cousins through their grandfathers. Walburga has two younger brothers, Alphard (Uncle Alph; posthumously disowned for leaving Sirius his money) and Cygnus Black (Uncle Cyggy). Cygnus Black is married to Druella Black, née Rosier, and their children are the three Black sisters, Bellatrix, Andromeda and Narcissa. We all know that Bellatrix, born 1951, was married to Rodolphus Lestrange. Narcissa was born in 1955, making her four to five years older than Sirius, who was born in November of 1959, and therefore, she's at least 20 to 21 years old as of summer 1976. I'm mentioning their ages because I've chosen to take take JKR's word-of-god info as canon on this front, and I've found a lot of people like to have Narcissa at Hogwarts the same time as Severus, so just a clarification about it (I'm also just a stickler for detail who likes sharing knowledge with others, so here, have some tangentially-relevant information just because...)


	14. Ch I,12: The Weighing of Failure

**Chapter 12: The Weighing of Failure**

Lying in bed that Friday evening, unable to sleep, listening to Mary's soft snores and Bettina's congested nose, Lily finally forced herself to evaluate the events that had taken place in the last three and a half months leading up to this moment, because the revelation that Severus had chosen a side – _her_ side – it suddenly changed everything. Bereft of that righteous fury over his actions, relieved of the pressure of worry about what would happen to him if he chose wrongly, Lily simply felt unbearably exhausted, for once in a good way. She'd been feeling exhausted for a good long while now, but this exhaustion felt different; it felt like pure, undiluted relief.

And with the relief came guilt, because now that she was certain she and Dumbledore had won him away from Voldemort, now that this all-encompassing shadow was gone, every time she looked back on their fights and arguments that she'd been pressuring him with all while he'd been meeting with Dumbledore and finding his way to the Light, she saw her own faults, those faults he'd been yelling about and she'd been refusing to hear, that had no doubt made it harder for him, rather than easier. And yet he'd still done this, for her, Dumbledore had said, and she knew now that she needed to find a way to honour his choice, to be truthful to it. To do that, she needed to start being honest, with herself and with him.

And that meant thoroughly assessing her feelings for him and their friendship.

Lily had always considered herself a compassionate person, a good friend. She certainly strived towards it, and she'd thought to be achieving it. Yet now she was very unsure of that conviction, for the simple reason that, even though she'd always claimed Severus as her best friend, she'd stopped feeling that as a fact a while ago. Until the revelation about that Incident with Sirius Black, James Potter and Remus Lupin, Lily's emotions on the subject had been, perhaps, somewhat muddled, but looking back on them now that her head was so scrambled up, she couldn't deny just how... unenthusiastic they seemed in comparison.

Remembering that made her wonder when and how she'd come back from barely caring to finding herself so hurt by one single word that she'd actually screamed at him in a public hallway, practically for the whole Gryffindor House to hear, because the fact was that anything and everything she'd felt towards him had cooled down to mere embers by last winter to such an extent that she'd needed to actually _think through_ Severus telling her he'd been almost killed, as if it was some complex Arithmancy equation instead of something that should have immediately made her fearful and enraged and panicked. He'd been right when he'd pulled away from her back then, perfectly right, because the fact was that she'd pulled away from him long before then, and considering Severus' usual perceptiveness, he had to have noticed it too.

It all fit now, though – Severus' drawing in and their strange limbo of half-aborted arguments and walking on eggshells around each other, that had to have been when Dumbledore had started trying to pull him to their side, when he'd started forcing Severus to question whatever he'd needed to question about himself in order to turn away from that dark path that led to Voldemort. And, thinking on it, that had to have also been what had kick-started Lily's emotions about their friendship after the shake-up that learning about the Whomping Willow Incident had given her – by preventing her from finding her footing again, his strange behaviour had kept her from falling back into the near-emotionless that had pervaded her thoughts about Severus at the beginning of the year. She'd not once considered how charged their latest arguments had become until now, but comparing them to their arguments from before the Christmas hols, it was glaringly obvious in hindsight that she'd herself changed with respect to him without even noticing.

So why had she prolonged their friendship before the Whomping Willow Incident, really, if she'd stopped caring for him as much as she'd had when they were children? In the past, before the Incident, Lily knew she would have claimed that she was holding out hope he'd change, turn back from that crowd he'd gotten involved in and become more like he'd been when they'd been little. She'd tried to keep hold of that reasoning in the last almost four months, too; it had been exactly what she'd told Remus when he'd asked her about it not too long ago. But it was a falsehood, like so many other things about hers and Severus' relationship, and being fully honest meant letting go of a comforting self-lie, even if it left a terrifying truth in its wake.

A terrifying truth, because there was one specific piece of knowledge, deep down, that Lily possessed. She had never breathed a word of it, hadn't dared even properly acknowledge it to herself, and shied away from all signs of it, even in moments when undiluted fear pulled the curtain of deliberate blindness away and made it so very obvious. It was knowledge that, whether she'd liked it or not, had been there for some time, and that night, for the first time in her life, she finally forced herself to look at it squarely without flinching.

Severus was in love with her.

Her recent friendship problems aside, Lily wasn't stupid. Just like she'd known that there was truth to Severus' insistence on Remus being a werewolf back before she'd had it spelled out for her so terrifyingly, so too did she know that there were kernels of genuine truth in Petunia's and Mary's pointed remarks regarding Severus' near-stalkerish and obsessive interest in her, even if even now, she wasn't seeing it in any such sinister-sounding way. Those comments hadn't been something she'd wanted to analyse in any conceivable manner, and so long as he didn't bring it up directly with her, she'd felt secure in that decision.

The question, then, was whether the very fact that she knew his feelings for her were far from platonic had influenced her actions towards him, and thinking back on it, combing through their interactions going back a week, a month, a year, Lily was forced to conclude, with a terrible sinking feeling in her stomach that tasted of horror, that it had. There was seductive pleasure in being the centre of someone's attention; she'd seen girl after girl fall for Potter's charms exactly because when he turned his sights on them, it was with the full force of his focus and personality. Lily had by and large ignored his interest in her so far, and with the way she'd become truly cognisant of his targeted bullying towards Severus, what little leeway she'd been giving him had dried up. But perhaps the very reason why she'd never been very impressed with him was the fact he wasn't, in fact, living up to her standards – the standards she'd developed through her friendship with Severus. Hogwarts time was turbulent, upsetting, always busy with studies and people and new things, but come summer, and it was again smoggy Cokeworth and just the two of them, Lily and Sev, spending hours upon hours lying on the grass by their tree, gazing at the clouds, talking or simply spending time together. There were no distractions there, no wizarding world, no other friends, and no real arguments about Dark Magic or evil wizards or Potter's gang, either. Tuney had been wrong when she'd written that Lily loved Cokeworth; she didn't. What she loved was that in Cokeworth, all of Severus' attention was reserved solely for her.

So really, looking at it like that, the reason she truly clung to their friendship wasn't any sort of altruism on her part, or some sense of duty towards him either, but the security that there was one person in the world aside from her blood relations who loved her no matter what, to whom she was so very important. And what did that say about her?

Severus deserved better than this, better than his best friend using him as a security blanket, better than the reason for what could well be the biggest decision of his life thinking of him as something that she kept close because she'd grown accustomed to it, but didn't feel like putting any true effort in. For all his flaws – and Severus had many, Lily had known that in one way or another for years – he was one of the most loyal people she'd ever met, and he considered her worthy of his loyalty. She needed to live up to such humbling trust, and right now, she felt as far from it as she had in her life.

Well, if nothing else, the path forward was clear – if she wanted to save their friendship, then she had to stop all of it: stop letting herself use his feelings for her to keep playing this tug-of-war they'd been in for the last two years, stop treating him like an obligation or a relic of her childhood instead of the best friend she was claiming him as, and stop berating him for every single thing he did that she disliked. And the first thing she had to decide was whether she truly wanted to be friends with him or not.

It was such a difficult decision to make, not least because with the reveal Dumbledore had made, about Severus' allegiance and the reason for his choice, she felt to an extent duty-bound to stay friends with him. She couldn't imagine how he'd be able to deal with spying on his friends – because whether they were or not, Severus considered them as such, and that was what she knew would matter in the end – if the person he'd chosen to do it for rejected him. Lily wasn't quite sure what spying on people entailed, but she didn't think he'd get out of it unscathed if his so-called friends learned of his duplicity. But at the same time, she felt that it was the height of dishonour to pretend and give him hope if she wasn't truly willing to step up and put effort into repairing their friendship.

She tried to decide if Severus would mind her staying friends with him for the wrong reasons, and this, at least, wasn't something she needed to dwell on. The answer was obvious – he'd understand, because that was how Slytherins thought and Severus really was a quintessential Slytherin from what Lily knew of him, but he'd be deeply hurt, and all the more for the fact that she knew his true feelings for her. No, she couldn't do that to him; if she was going to be hurting him either way, then she was at least going to do it without any deception.

But her first attempt to imagine not being friends with him made the whole point moot – the very thought of their current stand-off prolonging indefinitely was such a sharply painful one, that it made her almost gasp into her pillow and drove her to pull the drapes of her bed open to relieve the sudden stuffiness of her bed. Immediately, the sounds of her two dormmates intruded, Bettina's heavy, congested breathing and Mary's almost-hiccoughing snores, and Lily closed her eyes and focused on those for a long moment to get away from the emotional pain.

Finally, when she felt back in control of herself, she slipped her feet into her slippers and padded softly out of the room, down the staircase and through towards the Common Room entrance. The Fat Lady barely stirred as she gently pushed the portrait out of the way and exited, needing to keep herself moving in order to process what had just happened. Mindlessly, her feet led her to the Astronomy Tower, luckily empty of any classes, and in the end, she sat down on the parapet and leaned back against the stone blocks while her gaze wandered upwards to the near-full moon.

So, perhaps it was more than simply habit that had kept her clinging to her friendship with Severus. Or maybe his actions, which amounted to a grand gesture for her, were stirring up even those emotions she'd thought long-dead in spite of the last four months. Most likely, she'd lost herself in the mire of confusion and disappointment and wrong expectations, frustration and anger and outside influences, and now that she'd stripped it down to the one single most essential question – did she want to lose him from her life forever – the clarity had reasserted itself.

She didn't. She felt miserable just imagining it. And maybe it was the sort of misery that she could have ignored or pushed through or hidden from, had Severus not lunged for her four days ago and begged her to go speak with Dumbledore, but that didn't matter, because he had, and she wanted to give him another chance. She wanted to give them both another chance so badly her whole body ached for it.

Apparently, she wasn't done being his friend after all.

Exhaling, Lily wiped her cheeks with the edge of her pyjama top, feeling so horribly wrung out. The last four days – actually, the last three weeks, since witnessing Holland's screams in the hospital wing – had been such an emotional roller coaster, that for a moment she debated pushing all of this off another week and dealing with it in Cokeworth.

Then she discarded the thought with self-disgust; that was exactly the opposite of what a best friend would do. No doubt Severus was as much in agony about their split as Lily herself, probably more, considering, and to prolong it unnecessarily was just cruel. Had she always had this attitude, of putting herself before him in their friendship? If so, then she was the worst kind of friend ind–

She pulled sharply away from the thought, not having the strength to delve into it tonight. Being a good, compassionate friend was something through which she'd defined herself for years, and she needed that illusion, just for a day or two longer, just until she knew that she and Severus could make it through this rough patch. _That_ , she could leave for Cokeworth. It wasn't something she could deal with right now.

Instead, Lily turned her mind to finding concrete ways of repairing their friendship. It had all but crumbled under their feet, in many ways even more so after he'd disclosed his near-death experience to her, and she thought the reason for it was a fundamental lack of understanding, on both their parts. They were both far too stubborn for their own good, and once they'd dug their feet in, moving them was almost impossible. And while Lily hoped that Severus would see this, too, she knew that she needed to be the one to make the first move on this front. She wasn't quite sure yet how to do it, but at the very least, she thought that they ought to start by lancing the wounds, as it were – by having a frank conversation and purging all the negativity that had festered between them.

She certainly needed to be more understanding of his point of view. The burn of being so blind to the lengths to which Potter and his friends were willing to go to – had no compunction about going, really – was not one she'd soon forget. He'd told her about the Incident in March, and she'd berated them, but in light of Monday's events, she understood that she'd not fully processed it the way she ought to have. They'd acted – all of them, even Severus – as if this was something that was a common occurrence, a fun and even eagerly expected spectacle given the reactions of the crowd (and did _that_ make her angry, that they'd all just stood there and _laughed_ at Severus' pain). Choking him with soapwater, like that wasn't life-threatening torture if he only inhaled wrong, like it wasn't a violent physical assault...

And in what light did that cast the Whomping Willow Incident, if this was something _common_ between them, something so frequent as she'd never even suspected? Given that the first association she had with the Incident was 'Severus almost died', she was almost surprised that she could think it as even _worse_ than before, but she was doing so now, not least because Severus hadn't exhibited much increased fear or nervousness around them than he had before February, certainly not enough to have alerted her that something so serious had happened before he'd told her point-blank. This bullying, this persecution of theirs, hounding him at every turn, if it had been going on so intensely for the last two years... no wonder Severus always reacted so negatively to her defending them! And had it been going on even before fourth year? She had no clue how or when it had even started, but it certainly didn't look like it would be abating any time soon.

She allowed herself to wallow in pity for Severus being their victim, before finding herself once again disgusted with a train of thought. They targeted him, yes, and in that sense, he _was_ a victim, but labelling him as such – or, even worse, treating him as such – would be doing injustice to him. After all, there had been at least a dozen instances in the last two years that he'd put one of those four in the hospital wing for a day or longer. At the very least, that showed the level of his capability, considering it was four-on-one situation, but it also meant that, if there had been times when the situation might have been allowed to calm, he shared equal blame for exacerbating it to get revenge instead of letting it settle.

But she was going to be smarter about all of this from now on. She was not going to give Severus any more reason to doubt her on this point; she was conceding his view of it in full, and quite aside from him being in the right about this – because he was – she knew it would mellow him out a bit towards her. Hopefully that would be enough to make him see that she needed him to give a little, as well, if they were going to get through this.

Oh, she had no illusions about how it would go – they both had explosive personalities, and neither was much willing to suffer anything resembling verbal attacks. But screaming until they were red in the face hadn't done them any good, nor had avoiding confrontation, either. They needed to be able to _talk_ , without anyone's hackles rising, or else they were going to continue to fail. And for that, Lily knew, they needed to be willing to concede certain things and points (she knew she sounded a bit hypocritical about this, even in her own head – after all, she'd stopped conceding to much of anything he said a very long time ago, and until he'd started turning the tables on her by pointing out those faults of hers, she'd not even truly realised it – but at least she was finally admitting it to herself).

And, above all, she needed to force herself to have _patience_. Even Dumbledore had pegged the lack of it as her flaw that afternoon. And what else had he said? _The position he has chosen is a delicate one that will demand your understanding, perhaps more than you have been willing to give so far_. Yes, she at the very least needed to be understanding of his position and point of view, and she'd been failing in that, hadn't she? Had she failed in understanding _him_ , too? Beyond his views of the world, had she failed in grasping who he was as a person? She'd once told Potter and Black that he was the victim of his circumstances, and she knew those circumstances were bad, but had she ever truly understood what they'd shaped him into? They'd all harped on about choices, debated whether it was only choices that made the difference or not. But Lily found herself now feeling like those discussions had been utterly pointless, because how could any of them argue about Severus' choices or lack thereof, when they didn't know him as a person at all? She felt like she didn't know him, and she was supposed to be his best friend; those four didn't even see him as an actual person, let alone anything else.

Exasperated with that whole episode, Lily shook her head and pulled her legs back to firm ground. She was too tired to parse out that particular failing of her own tonight, and felt doubtful she'd manage it any time soon, either. But at least she'd become aware of the need for it, and it was as good a place to start as any.

Yawning, still feeling discontented and jittery (and beyond scared that in spite of her resolution, they'd not manage to stay friends) but at least a bit more settled now that she'd decided on a course of action, Lily walked back to the Gryffindor Tower and crawled into her own bed, only stopping to throw one last look at the moon and remind herself to check up on Remus tomorrow and on Sunday; with this rift between him and the other Marauders, he was going to be needing a friend. The full moon was tomorrow night, after all, and she knew how difficult that time was for him.

* * *

The last Hogsmeade visit of the year was on Saturday, mostly organised for the benefit of fifth- and seventh-years, who needed some way of decompressing after two extremely stressful weeks. Lily knew Severus wouldn't go; he had little money to spend on such things as Zonko's products or Honeydukes' sweets, and he had no particular liking for butterbeer. She told her girlfriends to go on ahead without her and loitered near the dungeon staircase until she saw him emerge.

"Severus," she called him softly, stopping him in his tracks. The corridor was empty, thankfully, but he looked very apprehensive and closed off, making her want to shuffle on her feet to relieve the awkwardness of the moment. "Can we talk?"

He looked around them, black eyes quickly but apparently efficiently scanning their surroundings, before he nodded his head. They walked in silence to the small laboratory that Lily had the use of, with almost a foot of space between them filled with a charged tension that Lily had no clue how to break. When they both slipped into the small room and Lily closed the door behind them, Severus stopped by the workbench and finally looked at her again with wary eyes, and Lily knew she had to be the one to open this conversation.

No matter how he felt about her and their standoff, Lily knew that Severus' pride had suffered as much as it had the ability to, that night when they'd spoken in front of her common room. And she didn't want to make this any harder on him than it had been already.

So, it was going to be harder on her, she thought, wrapping her arms around her midriff protectively. She could deal with that; after all, it was only fair.

"I spoke with the Headmaster yesterday."

Severus' facial expression didn't change much at her pronouncement, but his eyes did – they filled with such a strange mix of hope, fear and yearning that Lily felt her throat tighten. She wouldn't have needed this additional proof that he was hoping for a reconciliation – his desperate pleading on Monday evening had been proof enough – but it lent her bravery the strength to push her through this initial, awkward part of the conversation.

It felt dizzyingly good to know she wasn't the only one who wanted to salvage this.

"Severus, I am... I am unbearably proud of you, for choosing to do what's right."

His breath left him almost audibly, his shoulders dropping, and he looked like nothing so much as a deflating balloon, as a puppet with its strings cut.

Lily suddenly had a very nasty suspicion that she'd underestimated the extent of his anguish over this, or that this would have been the worst thing to say, had she had no intention of continuing their friendship. As it was, she just took a deep breath and delivered what she knew he needed to hear from her.

"I forgive you, for Monday."

" _Thank you_ ," he breathed out, leaning back against the workbench heavily.

Lily licked her lips.

"Severus. I forgive you, I do, but you have to know that you hurt me. Deeply. And it's not... I hate your bigotry, and let's not lie to each other or skirt around the issue anymore, please. You've been buying into those Slytherins' blood purity for years, and I know why, I get it, I know you have problems with you father, but you called me that word, Severus. And maybe I was the idiot for clinging to an illusion I built out of a promise you'd made to me when we were ten, but I'd really thought–" She broke off, sucking in a shuddering breath as her eyes started to sting. She told herself firmly she wasn't going to cry about this, and not now when they'd only begun their conversation. It was damn hard, though; every time that horrible word echoed in her mind in his voice, her stomach twisted into knots and she felt like curling up and never facing the world again.

"I didn't mean it, Lily," Severus said quietly and earnestly, pushing off the workbench to stand properly before her. "I'd never mean it, not for you, not _ever_ – Lily – I was just angry, and–"

"I know," she interrupted him with a shake of her head. And she did; her tongue got away from her when she was spitting mad, too, and Severus had a very close relationship with his anger, one that had only grown and grown in the last few years. "I don't– I've forgiven you, and I mean it, but I can't– I need you to understand how I felt, Severus. It was that word, yes, but it was more than that, don't you see? I've been trying to cling to this idea that it doesn't matter to you, my heritage, but it does, it does enough that you used it to hurt me. For defending you!"

"Not on purpose–"

"No, but you would have easily used it purposefully to hurt someone else! You treat me differently from all other Muggle-borns, and I thought that was more than nothing, but it's not! Because I know that one day, me being me won't be enough, and you'll find yourself using it purposefully on me, too!"

"Lily, I'd never–" Severus broke off, running his hand distractedly through his hair, greasy strands sticking together so that near his scalp they remained standing up straight, and he looked at the same time anguished and exasperated in equal measure, so that Lily knew she wasn't explaining it right.

"But you did, and that's the point, Severus. I don't want to be the exception to your rules in this, because your beliefs are hurtful, and quite aside from the fact that they're unfair and wrong, you putting me up above everyone just makes me feel like I have to constantly keep my guard around you, because I can't ever know that you won't turn and stab me in the back like you did last Monday. There cannot be such an absolute disconnect in your head between your stances and me belonging to the group you're prejudiced against, it can't. And I can't go through this again, Severus. The pain you've caused me, it's..." She fell silent, unable to finish the sentence.

"So what do you want from me?" he asked, shoulders slumping, and Lily swallowed.

"I want you to really try and overcome it, this belief that having non-magical parents makes us less worthy. It's not even about laws or propaganda or even You-Know-Who, it's about you and me. I need to be able to feel secure that this won't ever happen again, and I don't know how else to do that but for you to change your views." He opened his mouth, but Lily continued, stopping him before he'd spoken a syllable. "I know it's something that has deep roots in you, and I know that it'll be doubly hard because of what you're doing for Professor Dumbledore, but–" She stopped and changed direction. "I want us to be friends, Severus, proper friends, and this time, I'm really going to try my hardest, but I need you to try, too. Can you do that?"

He exhaled and ran his hands through his hair again, both of them this time, before lowering them and clenching them into fists. When he looked at her, there was honest determination in that gaze.

"Yes. Yes, I can." He took a deep breath, hesitant for a moment, before seemingly ploughing on with sheer stubbornness. "But I can't – can't promise that I'll succeed." And it hurt Lily, and she knew it cost him, too, but gratefulness flooded her at his words. He was being honest, and that was exactly what she needed. What they both needed out of this. "But I _will_ try."

She felt herself unwind. One sentence, and he'd eased one of the things that had been weighing on her for years. "Good. Thank you. For the effort and the honesty, too." She took a breath to psych herself up for what needed to be said next. Honesty. "I'm sorry, too, Severus. For not listening to you all those times you told me about Potter and his friends. For not... giving proper weight to their actions. You were right about them, all along, and I just... didn't want to think about it."

Keeping eye contact with him through her apology had proven more difficult by far than she'd thought it would be, but she'd done it, and now she got to see his expression slacken in stunned disbelief. And it became obvious to her that even though she'd stood by him regarding the Whomping Willow Incident, even though she'd gone to Dumbledore for it and yelled at Potter and Black too, even though she'd been sharper with them over the last four months, she'd not truly been willing to stand behind Severus' opinion of them, the way a best friend would have. And he'd seen it, all along, of course he had, because Severus was one of the most observant people she knew, and she'd not really wanted to put thought into it, had she?

"You mean that?"

"I do," she confirmed. "Potter and Black are as horrible as those Slytherins you keep company with, and it shouldn't matter what kind of magic they use, because they hurt people either way."

But instead of looking happy or satisfied, Severus frowned.

"Potter and Black. And Lupin?"

She'd hoped he wouldn't catch that quite this quickly. Honesty. So, she bought herself a few moments as she licked her dry lips, and forced herself to be honest. "Remus is different."

As she knew it would, Severus' face twisted into an ugly scowl. "I should have guessed."

"Look, they're not– Remus laid into them about Monday, and... well, he's not said much to me, but you must have noticed that they aren't... on the best of terms."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that he tried to make them see sense, and, I suppose... he's out of their group. Or something. And I told him, three weeks ago, I told him that I'd not associate with him if he was just going to stand by and do nothing to stop them, because you were right about that, too, it makes him at least as bad as them. But he's stood up to them, and now he's paid with their friendship for it."

"Oh, poor him," Severus sneered.

"Yes, poor him," Lily almost ground out. "Potter and Black are unmitigated bullies. Remus is lonely. He may be callous about what his friends do, but he went with it anyway because they are the only friends he's ever had, and he's now taking a stand against their actions. Does that remind you of anyone else I know?"

"You cannot be implying–"

"That's _exactly_ what I'm implying. I've given our friendship a second chance because you've shown me that you're willing to change. So has he, and I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't see my friendship with him through as well, even more so because you are still ostensibly friends with those Slytherins, and he literally has no one else but me. James won't even look at him, and Sirius is being downright antagonistic any time Remus is anywhere near him. Peter's hardly better, either, he always does what they do. Remus was not a good person for what he's done so far, but he deserves a chance to become better, and I can't in good conscience abandon him to it. How is that different from what you're doing?"

"Are – are you saying that..." Severus rubbed his palm on his leg, swallowing loudly as he pulled himself in. "That you gave me – us – a second chance... because of duty?"

"No!" Startled by her own outburst, Lily cleared her throat. "No, Severus, that's _not_ what I'm saying. Don't ever think that, all right?"

"How do you know?" he challenged, though it seemed that her words had appeased him.

"Because I considered it. I thought about it. And I decided that if the only reason I was going to forgive you was because I felt... bound... by what you'd done for me–"

"I hadn't–"

"Dumbledore told me–"

"Told you _what_?"

"That I was... our friendship was important to you. In this," she added, tongue sticking but the qualifier lie coming out nonetheless, because she wasn't ready to admit to him that she knew, she wasn't ready to deal with it. Not yet. "And I knew you'd understand, of course you would, and maybe you'd even accept it. But I'd hurt you, and I don't... if I was going to hurt you, I'd do it for an honest reason. But that's all completely irrelevant, because I _want_ us to be friends, proper friends, like we were supposed to be. I want us to be worthy of calling each other best friends."

So much for honesty. Lily felt disgusted with herself, but not enough to say it, not that. She'd tell him another time, when they were in a better place, when she could risk it, when she wasn't half-way to rattling apart from the tension herself.

"All right," he acquiesced. "All right, I believe you. But it's not the same, Lily. Me and Lupin, we're nothing alike."

"How aren't you?"

He opened his mouth, then closed it and shook his head.

"You can't understand."

"What's that mean?" she asked sharply, straightening.

"Nothing."

"Don't prevaricate, Severus! It's what's gotten us into this mess in the first place, not listening to each other and not finding ways of properly expressing ourselves, either. If you're upset with me, then tell me why. If you don't think I'd understand something, then try explaining it for a change! Don't treat me like an idiot incapable of grasping complex concepts!"

"Well, you've never done so far!" he shot back, her rising tone obviously riling him up. "You've _never_ understood my position in Slytherin House, not ever! You can't, because you don't _think_ like we do, Lily! Just like you can't understand that Lupin may be all alone in the world, but at least he doesn't have to fear for his life every single moment of every single day! He doesn't have to look forward to that for who the hell knows how long! I do! We may have both turned our back on our friends, but only one of us can end up dead or worse because of it, and it's not him!"

"So if I can't understand it, why are you holding it against me all the time?"

"Because you don't even want to _try_ ," he replied, looking half-conflicted with himself about telling her all of this, but doing it anyway. "All you've ever done is harp on me about the people I spend my time with without ever asking me why I'd want to be in their company or what I get out of it or even why I might like them at all!"

"All right," she said, though it sounded nothing like a concession; she wasn't conceding this one. He couldn't have it both ways – either she was unwilling to understand, or incapable. She couldn't be both. "Why? Why do you like them? What do you get out of it?"

And what kind of statement was that, anyway? Get something out of a friendship, like the whole point of it was personal gain?

He blinked, making it obvious that she'd caught him off guard. Good; falling into old habits was a sure-fire way of messing it up, and so long as they continued to knock one another off those paths, there was a chance of this actually working out.

"Well? You're claiming that I never wanted to understand. I do now, so here's your chance, Severus."

"Fine," he agreed, taking a step towards her and delivering his words almost as an attack, as Lily had expected him to; when it came to fighting with Severus, she'd long ago learned the ebb and flow of it. After months of half-aborted arguments and those last few screaming matches, this was finally familiar ground, and in a way, it felt reassuring, too. She needed a little reassurance right about now. "You're right about them, they're cruel and they care nothing for others, and they have no compunction about using Dark Magic to hurt people, but they are the people I've had to live with for nine months out of the year for five years. They watch out for their own – me included – they don't call me names or care about my appearance, and they respect me, my knowledge and my abilities, they ask my advice, they've protected me–"

"How?" she interrupted, staring at him in disbelief. "How do they protect you, Severus? The way they protected you last Monday, from Potter and Black? The way they watched out for you, stood up to those two, made them stop? And what respect are we talking about? Based on what? Your knowledge and abilities? The Dark Magic you know, the curses and hexes and potions you come up with? They don't _respect_ you for it, they want to _use_ you for their own agendas, and those kinds of friends are no friends at all!"

"Well, then, what other kind of friendship _is_ there?" he demanded, and it was her turn to be brought up short by the question.

"What?"

"You're saying that using each other isn't friendship, aren't you? Well, I've never seen any other kind! Merlin, Lily that's what friendship _is_ , mutual exploitation of the other person. That's the whole point."

Horrified, she nearly reared back, as her stomach dropped into her shoes.

"No, it's not," she answered with vehemence, shaking her head. "It's not, Severus, it's not!"

"How is it not?" he demanded, and if his voice had the edge of desperation in it, Lily wasn't sure if she was imagining it or not, but it made cold sweat break out on her forehead and palms nonetheless. "Everyone in Slytherin thinks so – that's the only kind of friendship in Slytherin – you _taught me_ about friendship, Lily! I never had any friends before you! It's – what are you even _saying_ , Lily? I don't – you're wrong. Friendship is mutual exp–"

"Stop! Stop it! Just, just stop saying that!"

"Then what else would it be?!"

Oh, _Merlin_ , what had she _done_?! What had she–

A sob escaped her, and she covered her mouth with her palm, because he was right, this was her fault, she was the one who'd shown him wrong, she'd been _using_ him from the very start, like those boys in Slytherin he claimed as friends, she'd used him when they were kids to learn about the wizarding world, and she'd used him to feel special and better than Petunia, and she'd used him in order not to be the only one without any friends when they got to Hogwarts, and she'd used him because she liked being the centre of someone's attention, and she'd used him to vent her frustrations and stress on, and she'd used him to prove to her friends that she was independent from them, and, and, and she'd used him to pick up potion-making tips, too! And in the last two years, that was _all_ she'd been doing, wasn't it? She'd never once cared to ask him about his other friendships, never once cared to wonder why he was so focused on Potter and Black, never once considered his feelings about pretty much anything, not when they were at Hogwarts, and what did those other two months even count for, then? So what if she snuck him into her room to keep him away from his home, or that she spent hours and hours just sitting by the river and talking about nothing and everything with him, or that she slipped half a quid into his jacket pocket without him knowing here and there? What did that even count for, if she'd only taught him that to be friends with anyone, he needed to be willing to be used and to use in turn?

She was the _worst_ kind of friend anyone could have, selfish and stupid and uncaring. She was the furthest thing from compassionate or good! But if she couldn't be, if she wasn't a compassionate or good friend, then who the hell was she? What kind of person was she, that she'd had Severus thinking this way for years and years? Did he... had he spent years thinking that for them to be friends, he was supposed to let her use and abuse him, and that this was what she'd expect from him, too?

"You don't..." she said through tears, eyes riveted to those black orbs that held such captivating endless depth, "you can't think that... I... when... I-I used you– but you... you never used me, you–"

Severus, looking more and more alarmed, reached out towards her with his hand, seemingly unconsciously, and Lily pulled back sharply, not ready to accept any sort of comfort that might soothe her well-earned self-flagellation. She deserved to hurt like this, to have her whole identity break down, she _deserved_ it, and if she let him comfort her, then she'd deserve it even more.

"Lily – Lily, are you – calm down, just cal–"

"Tell me! Please, t-tell me. You never–"

"All right," he said, voice forcibly flat, because of course he had no clue how to handle her anguish, he was rubbish as handling his _own_ emotions, let alone hers. "Of course I did. You let me use this room, didn't you? And I learned half of everything I know about Magical Theory from you."

"No! No, that's not– the b-big things. Like I– like I did. Or else it's not... not that kind of friendship!"

He was silent, and would he not tell her? Was it worse or better that there wasn't anything as big as her transgressions? Did it mean that, that he was going against what he knew, that he understood it wasn't what friendship was? Or did it make her own actions even worse if it wasn't mutual?

"Your attention," he said quietly, cutting off her frenzied train of thought, Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed. "I wanted your attention, I wanted... I wanted you, and I – it's – I used you to feel better, to get away from home, to – to make my choice, I used you to – to be the happy in my life, to – to keep you to myself."

Oh, god, he was saying it, he was– he couldn't, not yet, she couldn't– not that, too, and she–

She felt her knees give out and she barely grabbed hold of a nearby shelf to keep herself from breaking them as she crumpled to the ground, choking on her sobs and tears as she squeezed her eyes shut, her whole frame shaking from the force of it all.

"Lily!"

"I'm sorry, I'm– I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I–"

"Lily, calm down; please, calm down."

Long fingers were wrapping around her upper arm, and she shook her head frantically.

"My fault, my– how could I've– I'm such... such a _bitch_. Sev-verus, I'm s-sorry."

"Why?" his voice, low and smoky dark, mutated somewhere along the way that she'd not even truly noticed, whispered near her ear, and she reached out blindly with the hand that wasn't trying to hold the sobs in, reached out until she found coarse fabric under her fingertips to squeeze. "Lily, what in the world have you to be sorry for?"

"Don't you see?!" she moaned out, curling into herself. "I k-knew. I – I know, I've... but I hated those boys, I – I didn't want you to–"

"Know what?"

She couldn't even tell if it was said in confusion or accusation, it didn't matter, she had to confess, she had to– he deserved–

"Y-your feelings, I knew– for me, I–" the fingers on her arm spasmed, but she blabbered on, "I wanted – like at home, I w-wanted – but you wouldn't _listen_ , and I– I manipulated you – it's not what, what friendship – it's not."

"What is it? Lily," voice leading, the name he called a caress, tense and calm and she felt dizzy, like she couldn't catch her breath, didn't have enough air in her lungs, heart hammering so loudly in her ears she could barely hear her own voice, but his was pulling her, "Lily, tell me what friendship is."

"T-rusting the other p... the other person to, to do things with... without expecting anything in return."

"What else?"

"N-not want... not wanting compensation for, for helping or – or doing nice things."

"What else?"

"Getting... getting told you're wrong e-even when you don't – don't want to, to hear it."

"What e–"

"List– listening to their problems. W-wanting them to... to succeed. Being there even, even when it's not– not convenient. Having their, their back, always. Fill– filling the, the emptiness after they – after they give up things f... for you. "

She could catch a breath, every fifth maybe, she–

"You are my best friend, Lily. _Best_."

She couldn't catch her breath–

"No, I– I'm not, I'm– Severus, I can't, I– I had no right, no– not me, I thought but I'm not–"

Pressure around her sides and back, and his robes smelled of detergent and smoke and herbs. Her fingers snaked up to clutch the hair on his neck while the others held to the coarse cotton. He was cool against her heated cheek, and she couldn't quite understand, Severus didn't initiate contact like this, not full hugs, not holding her like he'd never let go, and she dissolved into incoherence as she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed it all out, lost in the haze of misery and shame and not knowing what this made her, but at least he was there even when she didn't deserve it, and she was too weak, too weak to resist as she clutched to him like a drowning man to a buoy, not even noticing his stiff back or his heavy breath, eternally grateful and not even knowing how she'd lucked out with him.

A gentle palm pressed against the side of her face, fingers tangling in her hair and pressing her head to the flat plain of his chest, and she'd have been shocked that he even began rocking her had she any thought to spare.

And she cried and cried and cried, not knowing how to deal with it, how to deal with learning a part of herself was false, how to deal with learning she'd been hurting him for so long, how to deal with being responsible for his faulty perceptions of something so essential, so self-defining as friendship. She was only sixteen, and she _didn_ _'_ _t know how to deal_.

* * *

It took a while, but Lily did manage to calm herself down, helped along by the utter exhaustion that gradually overcame her hysterics and the swaying motion of their bodies as Severus gently rocked her. Long after she fell silent and the tears stopped, though, she clutched to him with everything she had, because though her outburst had given her emotions release, it didn't truly change anything. The storm within her still raged, the self-disgust and self-disappointment ever strong, and the gaping hole that had once been a big part of her identity like a weeping wound of her soul.

Finally, when her aching fingers began slipping, Severus pulled her away from himself slightly and, dragging his sleeve down to clutch it against his palm with his fingers, gently wiped away some of the tears and snot on her flaming face. She blinked, feeling dizzy and swollen, eyes stinging so much she could barely keep them open, and rested her forehead against his cheek.

"You're a better friend to me than I ever was to you, and you didn't even know what friendship was."

His hand found its way back to the nape of her neck.

"I forgive you."

She exhaled in a whoosh and slumped against him.

"I can't forgive myself."

"Don't give up on us, Lily. Please."

She stayed silent until her nose cleared a little and her breathing evened out, moving only to wipe away the moisture on her face. And all the while Severus remained right there on the cold stone floor with her, stiff and half-awkward but determined, until she felt like she could think through all the turbulent emotions still within her.

There was only one true clear thought that formed, one positive in the sludge of negativity. At her core, Lily was a doer, and no matter how much the situation felt hopeless, she instinctively sought out solutions that could be implemented. Only one presented itself now, but even that was enough.

"I think I need to fix myself," she told him, pulling back to meet his black eyes, and his hands fell away from her. "I never thought about... I don't want us to be this bad again, but I have to... to find a way to change or..."

"What are you saying, Lily?"

She grabbed his hand and squeezed with hers. "I want us to be friends. But I need time. I need to... to put it all into order in my head. I don't want to be who I am, I can't, but I don't know who else I'd be, or, or who I even _can_ be. And you need time, too, Severus."

"I don't–"

"When did you start spying?"

He frowned at her in confusion, but indulged her question. "Three weeks ago. After those seventh-years were..."

"When you were late, and we fought. You were already..."

He took a moment to think, before inclining his head lightly.

"Yeah. Right before that."

He was making her point. "See? You'd done it but we still fought about the same things. And you still called me that word–"

"I'm sorry."

"And I'm sorry for calling you that horrible name those two came up with," she apologised back. Such a little thing, but she could tell it meant a lot to him. "We're... we're not the kids we used to be, Severus. Seven years is long. We changed, for the worse. I want this – us – but I don't want us to rebuild our friendship on falsehoods, on outdated perceptions. And how can we know each other when we don't even know ourselves? I'm..." she swallowed the bile back down. "I hate myself," she whispered, for herself, to give voice to that most damning of thoughts, shaking her head. "I can't function like this, Severus. I need to... to think about this and... and decide how to be a better person. And you need to come to terms with what all this spying business means to you, too."

"You want time," he repeated, but the words were coloured in understanding.

"Yeah," she confirmed quietly. "For the both of us."

He licked his lips, seeming on the verge of asking something, but in the end he only shook his head and squeezed her fingers, and she felt pathetically grateful that he'd not gone where she thought he'd wanted to go. This was already too much; addressing his romantic feelings for her wasn't something she could handle, not now.

"You deserve better." It was the only comfort she had to offer.

"No," he answered. "You're the one who deserves better."

Huffing in pale amusement, Lily shook her head to let the matter go; they'd never reach any accord on this, because he thought himself worthless and she thought herself undeserving.

Undeserving or not, though, Lily needed something to give her strength for the coming hours and days and weeks, needed something to hold her up and shine ahead, something that she knew she'd be working for, working towards.

"Will you spend the day with me?" she asked him. "Just the two of us. There's almost no one in the castle, and if we sit by the lake, under that big tree–"

"You want to pretend that we're home?"

She nodded, biting her lip, and Severus looked so very sad to her in that moment.

"I want to remember."

He shook his head.

"Not remember, Lily. Make new memories."

It was such an incongruous statement to her whole perception of him, only serving to further prove that she didn't truly know her best friend anymore. But it was his olive branch to her, like her admission of guilt had been to him, and she clutched it to her heart gratefully.

"Make new memories, yeah. That sounds nice."

* * *

 **A/N:** So, Lily's big breakdown has finally taken place, and hopefully its severity is understandable given the magnitude of what it means for her concept of self, as well as the fact that Lily is seeing it in light of what she perceives to be a huge action on Severus' part that she feels he's done for her, which further enhances what she sees as the negativity in some of her careless attitudes and actions towards him, apparently dating back to well before Hogwarts (and that have little to do with their central conflict of Severus wanting to side with a group that is biased against her, though at the moment it's all very tangled up together in her head). Do keep in mind that all my scenes are biased narrators, and that this always makes the truth very subjective on who is viewing it and under which (emotional) circumstances.

I mentioned in Ch 10 that there was a very strong reason for choosing to start my story months before the Mudblood Incident, and that this has caused some writing headaches to me. For those who were interested about this, I meant very specifically this and the following chapter, which were written well before practically everything else, as these were the scenes that fueled my initial inspiration for the whole story. The final versions are pretty much _nothing_ like the initial versions, because when I began writing, I was working from the emotional standpoints that the canon had impressed on me - namely, that Lily had long since lost her emotional investment in their friendship, and was during the Mudblood Incident at the point where she most likely didn't feel there was enough reason to tolerate Severus' actions any longer (as I'd explained before). What I initially wanted to explore was the question of whether they could patch things up if she were to be given a good enough reason to forgive him (Severus working for Dumbledore), and what it would take given that one of them seemed to care far more than the other. However, in the course of laying the groundwork for these events, the emotional landscape of their friendship changed - as you've probably noted by now, characters are the ones driving the plot in my writing, rather than the other way around - to such an extent that the initial versions of this and the scene directly following in the next chapter did not fit in the least, and needed to be rewritten practically from scratch, as I refused to go back and force the characters into standpoints and feelings that did not fit with the logical progression of events as I was depicting them just so that I could retain the initial underlying question I wanted to address with the story. I assume this is what famous writers mean when they say that 'their characters are the ones leading them on the journey' instead of them, as writers and creators, being the ones directing the narrative.

As for the initial idea, after turning it over in my head quite a bit when it hit me that I'd have to change some things in the story drastically, I've settled on the belief that if Lily's emotions for Severus had truly cooled down to the extent I felt they had in canon (and mind, I don't judge her for that in the least, I've had that happen to me in my life and those situations are no one's fault nor are they reprehensible; sometimes people simply grow into progressively more incompatible people and consequently drift apart, and the only parts of it that are open to judgment is how each party handles the fact that they can no longer be the friends that they once were), then her primary motivation for continuing their friendship would have been (as she notes) out of a sense of obligation or duty, and that is, to me, a _very_ bad foundation for anything, to the point where I'm not sure she could ever have developed genuine feelings for him that would be devoid of constant questioning as to how they came about and if this still makes them valid. So, given these ponderings, I am actually quite satisfied with how the twist has turned out, even if it had meant far more work for me than I had expected initially. Now they are on far more even footing, and everything that grows out of the efforts they put into their relationship will be more trustworthy to them for having been genuinely wanted by both parties.


	15. Ch I,13: The Reacquaintance w Friendship

**A/N:** A bit of background info for the chapter: Old Maid is a card game that's also known as Black Peter, where one card is unpaired (most often the queen is removed, hence the remaining one being the 'spinster' of the British title, but it can also be a jack - the eponymous Peter - or an added joker); the cards are dealt to all the players, and the game is played by one player drawing a card from the previous player's hand (unseen, of course) and trying to make pairs to discard. Eventually, all cards are paired and discarded except for the unpaired one, and the person who is left with the unpaired card is the loser. It does require some bluffing skills, and to my knowledge is quite an old game. Other names, according to wiki, include Schwarzer Peter and other germanic variants (Crni Petar is my native name for the game, meaning the same thing), le pouilleux/vieux garçon (France), ババ抜き (Japan), μου(ν)τζούρης (Greece), 도둑잡기 (Korea), Abu Foul (Egypt), Papaz Kaçtı (Turkey), Fedor/Jogo do Mico (Brazil). I'm mentioning it here so that you don't feel like you need to google it half-way through the chapter, but feel free to do so if you want to learn to play it, obviously; I quite like the game myself. Crazy Wizard's Magizoo is made up by myself, and the rules are as nebulous as you can imagine (meaning they mostly don't exist); what you need to know has been explained in the text itself. **  
**

* * *

 **Chapter 13: The Reacquaintance with Friendship**

Lily's green eyes were half-glazed as they stared unfocusedly across the expanse of the Black Lake, blood-shot and swollen, eyelids resting at half-mast, her eyelashes sticking to one another from the residual crustiness of tears. Her face still looked puffy and unflatteringly reddened, and her hair was almost as greasy as Severus' own, tied back in a dishevelled ponytail and sticking to her forehead and neck from the sweat.

It was hot outside, hotter than Severus could remember being this far north, and even in the shade of the big tree, there was no escaping the high temperatures, especially because neither of them were dressed for this sort of weather. There was more humidity in the air this close to the water edge, and combined with the emotionally wrenching morning they'd had, Severus would have felt drowsy, if not for the nervous churning of his stomach.

He didn't know what to say to break the syrupy silence between them. Lily's breakdown still sat so heavily on his mind, her broken, half-stuttered words and her heart-wrenching sobs and her confession. In the four days of silence between them, he'd almost given up hope that she'd heed his plea at all, because Lily rarely hesitated in anything, and after four days, there hadn't been much to expect, not really, not in Severus' mind. Yet she'd come, and there had been something so different with her right from the start. He'd seen it in the way she'd held herself, in the determination burning in her eyes, in the desperation in her voice that she'd tried to hide.

The world felt upside-down, somehow. Severus had not counted on that when he'd woken up this morning, had not thought that there was anything more left to shake him. But the conversation they'd had, Lily's words and actions, it had made things somehow at the same time more confusing than even that first conversation he'd had with Dumbledore all those long months ago, and also made far more sense than he felt he was comfortable with.

Once upon a time, he would have trusted Lily's words about friendship, about what a friendship was and what a friendship should be. He'd never given any true thought to that question, really; Lily had been his best friend since he'd been nine, his only friend until coming to Hogwarts, and though she'd been harping on about the other Slytherins, though she'd been periodically insisting that they weren't his true friends, he'd never put much stock in her words, had written them off as just an extension of her dislike of them, because what did 'true' even matter?

He didn't quite know what to believe now, but the instinctive trust that he had for Lily's expertise on the topic was deafeningly silent, gone as so much smoke, because if there was one thing that had become glaringly obvious in the last few hours, it was that Lily herself wasn't quite clear on that point. Her list of what friendship was, what a true friend was like, it was a list that didn't feel honest to any experience Severus had had recently, and it certainly was so blatantly false to the way Lily was conducting her friendships that she'd fallen to pieces over the contradiction. It had almost seemed as if she'd had an academic idea of friendship as a concept that was somehow divorced from the way she applied it in her own interactions with others – or at least that this was what she'd come to believe in the last hour and a half. Severus didn't feel capable of judging the veracity of such a thing, not when his own ideas about friendship were more than a little nebulous beyond the most obvious exploitative angle.

How that was possible, Severus didn't know, and moreover, he didn't think that she knew, either. He'd never in his life seen anyone fall apart the way she'd fallen apart, as if their very essence was being ripped to shreds. He wasn't certain that he wanted to parse out all the nuances of it, because his subconscious knew what a big part of that meltdown had been about, and straying into thoughts about what it meant that she knew his feelings for her, what it meant for them that he'd half-way admitted it all himself, what her guilt over the whole thing represented – those weren't the kinds of thoughts he could have in front of her, not less than an hour after the truth had come to light.

He wiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve, taking a moment to try and remember if there was any spells he knew that could cool them both down a little. Lily looked as hot as Severus felt, and his eyes strayed over to a drop that was making its way past her ear. It slid along her jaw a bit before continuing down her neck, and finally soaked into her already damp shirt collar. She wasn't wearing robes today; rather, she was dressed in regular Muggle jeans and a frilly, full-cotton yellow shirt, the colour doing nothing to hide the sweat-damp sections under her armpits and breasts, from what little of her stomach he could see from the way she was sitting.

There was a cooling charm that made a cold breeze flow in the general casting area, and Severus pulled out his wand to cast it, relaxing a little as soon as it took effect. Lily sighed despondently and slumped even further, curled up in a little ball as she was, with her knees tucked close to her chest and her arms wrapped around her shins, seemingly barely aware of anything around her.

It hurt him to see her so broken up, physically hurt him, and he wanted to find a way of pulling her out of this despair she appeared to have lost herself in. He understood the endless depths of negative emotions, and he understood the absolute terror of letting someone important so wholly down. But he didn't quite understand the root of Lily's emotional turmoil on an empathetic level. Through everything he'd done and experienced in those sessions with Dumbledore, through the self-reflection that successfully casting a Patronus had demanded, he'd never found any part of himself to be false to who he'd thought himself to be. He still felt all the same things that he'd felt at the beginning of the year, before accepting the Headmaster's offer of tutorship, still saw the world mostly in the same way, even if some smudged lenses were now gone. He wasn't quite sure how well he knew himself – angry, envious, selfish, greedy, but maybe also determined, loyal and capable of love – but thinking back on it, he was certain that he'd been all those things at the beginning of the year just as he was now, with only the emphasis he placed on any given part of himself having changed.

"Lily," he said softly, wishing to reach physically for her but not knowing how. "Do you– " his tongue felt thick in his mouth, clumsy, "– do you want to talk?"

She stirred, green eyes moving to meet his as she swallowed dryly.

"Yeah. Please."

He grasped for some topic that might interest her, and came up blank. It felt wrong, somehow, to fall back on their usual safe avenues of conversation, potioneering and charmwork and the upcoming holidays.

Lily took pity on him, as she always did.

"Will you tell me how you decided to help Dumbledore?"

Exhaling, Severus felt relief wash over him; as hard as he knew it would be, trying to find the words to explain the last four months, it was something he'd wanted to share with someone – with her – for at least half of that time, and now, finally, he was getting a chance. Lily knew, and she wanted to know, and for the first time in who knew how long, he had a feeling that she'd actually _hear_.

So he put away his discomfort and let the words come as they wanted.

"He – Dumbledore, I mean – offered to teach me the Patronus Charm. After you yelled at him that one time, he... I don't know why he wanted to speak with me back then, really. Maybe it was something you'd told him."

"What do you mean?"

"I know what our meetings were about for him," he explained, plucking stands of grass with his fingers as the complex clump of emotions associated with the whole thing tried to rise to the surface. "Teaching me the Patronus Charm, it was his way of trying to recruit me. Not trying, I suppose; he succeeded." Shaking his head, Severus deliberately turned away from the bitterness of that thought; he'd had no illusions about Dumbledore's motivations going in, and being angry about the method the old wizard had used three weeks ago to get him to finally make up his mind was a pointless feeling that he'd been trying to contain with his Occlumency studies, that Dumbledore had insisted in their last session he needed to learn to let go and disperse. He still wasn't certain where he stood with Dumbledore after what had happened, and the old wizard wasn't making it any easier for him to figure it out – they'd had little time to meet in the past three weeks, but when they did, Dumbledore was mostly acting the same way he'd been acting before the attack on the seventh-years, as if he was truly interested in Severus personally and not simply as a tool for gaining more information. As much as Severus' logical, cynical, Slytherin side was still telling him it had all been an act to win him over, his emotional, hopeful side – the one that was slowly winning out – was desperately clutching to the old wizard's actions as proof that Severus hadn't misjudged the situation, hadn't allowed himself to fall for a con, and distressingly, it was becoming the louder of the two.

At least, paradoxically, those meetings that were making everything so confusing were also giving him a way of dealing with it; Occlumency was allowing him to shut it all away and focus on more immediate problems that needed to be dealt with. His trust in the Headmaster had never been full, but it had grown out from under him almost unnoticeably, had become bigger than he'd thought it to be; Dumbledore's manipulation had wounded it, certainly, but it was still there, not only because with his choice, Severus had little option other than to force it for the sake of his own sanity, but also because act or no, Dumbledore's words of advice, the time he'd given for all those countless meets of theirs, and the knowledge he'd shared, those all stood separate from the man's emotions towards Severus, and they were what was keeping Severus' trust alive.

Severus had lived a loveless childhood, and if it had taught him anything, it had taught him to take what he could get in every situation. If it turned out that Dumbledore had been pretending this whole time about giving a damn for Severus' wellbeing, he knew it would hurt as much as his mother's rejections and his father's disdain, but at least he would have gotten knowledge and training out of it, and that would have to be enough. Deep down, though, he didn't really think that was the case; he was, after all, a Slytherin, and if there was something Slytherins could appreciate, it was a good manipulation, as well as the fact that such manipulations did not automatically negate the relationship that existed between the two parties – in spite of Lily's assertions about friendships, he still felt quite strongly that friendship built on the exchange of favours wasn't necessarily a false one.

Those were just... Slytherin friendships, he supposed, if what Lily had described were real ones. Perhaps his discomfort didn't come from Dumbledore's actions, so much as from the fact that he'd not truly expected such a thing from the man who was considered the paragon of Gryffindor House. Maybe it was just that he'd been caught unawares that was giving him trouble. Certainly Dumbledore was acting as if that day had truly changed nothing significant between them, and if push came to shove, Severus would have grudgingly admitted that Mulciber's and Avery's actions had left neither of them much choice in the matter in the first place.

"Severus?"

Blinking, Severus returned back to the present and Lily's expectant eyes.

"Sorry. I'm..."

He fell silent, unsure of what to say, and Lily shook her head.

"It's ok. So, did you do it? Can you cast a Patronus?"

"Yeah," he confirmed, heart suddenly picking up its rhythm as his thoughts turned to his silvery doe and Lily's green eyes. "Yeah, he taught me how. And..." he trailed off, realising the thorniness of the topic he'd almost waded into. His sessions with Dumbledore, the details of the conversations they'd had, they were personal, important, private, and those, he didn't want to share, not even with Lily after everything. But she needed _something_ from him, and he wanted to help her so much, despite not knowing how, as much as he wanted to share with her all the thoughts he'd had in the last four months, all the changes he'd pushed himself into, at least in some broader way. So maybe he couldn't help her himself, but he did have something he thought was useful – Dumbledore's advice. And that didn't require him to reveal almost anything that he didn't wish to, not really. So, he took a breath and ploughed on. "And, he helped me, to see some things, too. I had to, if I was going to succeed."

"Then it wasn't only about recruiting you," she concluded with a wan smile. "I'm glad."

"You aren't going to defend him?" he asked, looking askance at her until she shook her head.

"No. I believe in him, but I... I don't know, maybe you're right. You were right about Potter and Black, and I didn't want to listen to you. I don't want to make the same mistake again."

Severus nodded, exhaling lightly, and let it go.

"Can you tell me how he helped you? What things did he help you see?"

"He told me that I didn't have the option of staying out of the war, and that I had to make a choice before it got taken away from me. He was right, but when he asked me about it directly, I didn't know. I still–" he shut his mouth before the sentence was fully out; Lily had changed her mind because Dumbledore had told her about their arrangement, she'd said that she was proud of him for it ( _unbearably proud,_ and it squeezed like a tight, hot grip in his chest when it echoed in his mind in her voice). He couldn't admit his doubt, not to her. "He told me things, about the Dark Lord and about... about who Death Eaters really are, and I guess... I don't know, made me think about it all. And I couldn't decide, so he offered to teach me the Patronus Charm. I guess it was as good a way as any to get me to interact with him, give him a chance to recruit me."

"But that's not all, is it?" Lily asked, swallowing.

"At first it was. But the thing is, Lily, the Patronus Charm is _hard_. You have to, to have happy memories, strong ones, but it's not enough to just remember, you have to understand, that's what gives them power. I was failing, all the time. I couldn't conjure anything at all, for weeks. So he started insisting that I talk to him, about anything that was on my mind at the time, anything that was maybe upsetting me and making it hard to find happy memories. He kept insisting that voicing problems makes a difference."

"Does it?"

"I didn't think it would, but it does, in a way. It's different, when it's all in your head. You get all tangled up in it. But, hearing it spoken gives it clarity." And thinking back on it, Severus could feel dread at the thought of how much of himself he'd revealed to the old wizard. He didn't regret it really – he couldn't, not when the mere memory of the silvery doe could lift his spirits – but it was a frightening realisation nonetheless for someone who'd long ago learned that keeping his own council and keeping his innermost self well away from others was the only way that he could be certain he'd not get hurt. "I showed him some of my spells and potion corrections, and it's the same thing with those, as well. It... it helps to put things in order, in your mind."

"What happened?"

"I figured out that the reason I was failing was that I always felt angry, too angry to find memories strong enough for a Patronus. I... sometimes, I'm so angry I can't see things straight because of it. Like..." he swallowed, "like what happened on Monday."

Lily nodded slightly, but otherwise didn't let the conversation segue back to what had happened at the beginning of the week, and Severus only felt relief.

"And happy memories are so... insubstantial, I suppose," he continued. "Easy to pervert, with negativity. I had all these memories I thought had been happy, but they weren't good enough for the Patronus Charm, because they weren't strong, not really. They were... tainted, with all my negative feelings and they just made me angry, you know, because they were supposed to be happy memories and something always ruined them." He sighed and ran his hand through his greasy hair; the cooling spell had worn off, it felt to him, with sweat sliding down his back under his clothes. "It's why the Patronus Charm is so hard, because it wasn't just about remembering or reliving happiness, it was... it was understanding how and why, so that everything else doesn't weaken it. Dumbledore insisted that we go through each one I could remember, and we talked about... about what made it happy, and what made it weak, what... what I'd done to it."

"You?"

"Lily," he said shakily, voice wavering, the warring twin impulses of blurting it all out to her and biting his tongue to keep it in making the words wobble and break, "I'm not a happy person. I don't... I don't feel the way you do, on a normal day. And all that those memories remind me of is that everything gets taken from me, that I never have anything _good_ that's mine. It's... it's easier, not remembering at all, sometimes, and it's easier to think of the bad as the norm." Lily bit her lip, shuffling where she sat and somehow ending up a little closer, so that Severus almost felt his side tingling from her proximity, and he suddenly _wanted_ her to see this, wanted her to understand this one thing about him. "So I– I made myself look at those happy times as these worthless little moments, because there were so many others that weren't good, that weren't... Things don't get better than this, and holding out some dumb hope that they do is, is pointless, is..."

"Painful."

That was it exactly.

"I'm sorry for not seeing it, for not... helping you, when I should have," she said, peeking at him with tears in her eyes. "I know things at home aren't..." She snorted softly. "Merlin, that's such a stupid word, isn't it? Good. What's that even mean, good?"

Severus' mouth twitched into a smile in spite of everything. "I dislike it immensely, as well," he agreed. "It's too undefined."

"Exactly."

A silent moment passed before he shook his head.

"My parents... you're right, they're not like yours. I used to think that this is just who they always were. Hateful and miserable. So all those times when I saw as a child that perhaps this wasn't the full truth, it was easier to just think of those as my own wishful thinking, as false. Safer, I suppose."

"You were protecting yourself," she realised, blinking rapidly; a tear slipped down her cheek. "Did I... did I make things worse, Severus? Did I mess it all up even more, by being such a horrible friend?"

"Lily–"

"No, please. I– I know it's your story, and I want to know, I do, but–" She sucked in a shuddering breath and more tears slipped past her eyelids. "I hate that you feel this way, and I hate that I never saw it, never tried to, to pay attention. Severus, if... if Dumbledore hadn't reached out to you, if, if you hadn't gotten a chance to find out all this about yourself... where would we have been today?" Her voice broke, and she snuffled loudly, wiping her nose with the ridge of her hand, moisture on top of all the sweat already there. "What happened on Monday, it would have happened anyway, right? Because it had nothing to do with... with your meetings with Dumbledore, or with our fights or, or anything. Potter and Black, they'd have done something like this regardless, it would have been the same thing, and I... if I hadn't gone to Dumbledore, if you hadn't... pleaded, with me, to go..."

"You would never have forgiven me," he finished for her this time, throat clogging at the very thought.

"I... I don't think I would have. I would have felt justified, I think, like– before you came to the Common Room that night, I'd felt... It had hurt, so much, but I'd felt relieved too, that it was finally over, and I–" She swallowed, sniffing. "I was just so _tired_ , Sev, tired of fighting and tired of, of watching you pull away from me, and tired of everyone trying to convince me that I was wrong about you. I'd... I'd stopped... stopped _caring_ ," she said, the word breathed out, just an insubstantial puff of air, but it tore Severus' insides to ribbons, though Lily didn't seem to notice, because she was speaking, continuing her sentence, "before you told me about the attack back in the spring, I'd stopped caring about our friendship, and, and never even thought to tell you that, but then you started acting so weird and I couldn't get my bearings and, and... I never realised how much I still wanted us to be friends until, until last night, and I... it's my fault, isn't it, that we're here? I was angry for things not being the way I wanted them to be, when it was I who'd made them so in the first place."

"Don't exaggerate," he told her, and the word was far too sharp for what he'd meant, that she actually flinched, and he felt like a heel. "I didn't want to hear what you were saying as much as you didn't want to hear what I was saying." Merlin, that was hard to accept, but he had to, because what Mulciber and Avery had done three weeks ago, what they'd gotten the whole group to do, Severus included...

She _had_ been right, after all, about the harm they had no problem causing others. Now that she was on his side about the Marauders, now that he wasn't so blinded with hurt and anger about that, he could see it better. She had been right all along.

"Aren't we a pair?" she murmured, wiping her tears away.

"And you didn't make things worse, either," he continued, words sticking in his throat. "Perhaps you made them more difficult," he allowed, tentatively, as she blinked and looked up at him with her blood-shot eyes, "but you were the first person who ever gave a damn, Lily. You thought I'd insulted you, that first day, and you still came back and became my friend. You... you have no earthly _idea_ how much that's meant to me. Maybe you're right and you're as bad a friend to me as you think, but, Lily, you made being home bearable, over and over again, and that makes you good enough for me. In spite of everything else."

She let out a soft sob and he felt her lean against him, side to side, and link her arm with his so that she could entwine their fingers in the crevice between his knee and hers. Felt her lower her head against his shoulder, a warm, welcome weight. And in spite of the morose situation, in spite of the uncertainty and heaviness in the air around them, he couldn't help his heartbeat speeding up, couldn't help the flip of his stomach nor the warmth of his cheeks, couldn't help the contentment that blossomed in his chest.

The need to ask her about her confession, about the fact that she apparently knew... something regarding his feelings for her, about the fact that he'd half-way admitted them, that she'd gotten him to half-way admit it all, it was so strong that it made him open his mouth and take a breath to ask. Only in the last moment did he remember her devastated face when she'd told him about it, her momentarily petrified gaze when he'd tried to bring it up that first time after she'd calmed down, her sheer relief when he'd shut up without actually getting to it.

It was a struggle, to force himself to let it go for the second time that day. The words almost burned in his mouth, because there was a terror deep inside him that rang out with the voice of his inner Salazar Slytherin, a terror that kept trying to make him think about what that meant, that she knew, that she'd known for who knew how long, and he didn't want to listen to it, didn't want to think about what part that knowledge had played in the changes of their friendship, about what it meant that she'd known or suspected and never said anything, about what he'd do if he were to ask her point-blank and she were to shoot him down.

Some things were better a burn in the mouth than a stab through the chest, and Severus for once in his life found himself preferring the ambiguity of it all that let him keep his unruly yarn ball of hope and yearning and disappointment and infatuation that he always felt around Lily. It was a complex thing, a weighty thing; most importantly, it was a _positive_ thing. It meant that he was more than what his life had made him, more than what his parents or the Slytherins or Dumbledore or the Marauders or even Lily saw. He was someone who loved, and someone who'd allowed himself to be changed by that love, even though he wasn't certain that change was the right thing for him. It made him _more_ than he'd been before, the realisation and awareness of it all, and he clung to it desperately, because it felt like a thing that could make others proud, that _did_ make others proud already.

"Thank you," Lily's whisper made him look down at her, and, feeling ridiculously daring, he shifted just a little, until his nose and lips and chin came to rest on the crown of her head in a whisper of a touch that made her squeeze his fingers tighter.

In spite of all the emotional upheaval and all the uncertainty that still remained, Severus found himself feeling better than he had in years, sitting there in the quiet open space of the lakeside, with Lily's fingers laced through his and her head on his shoulder, with the privacy that reminded of home, where all the Hogwarts things didn't matter. It felt like a promise, one he let himself tentatively, quietly

(fiercely)

believe.

* * *

They didn't talk much after that, both too wrapped up in their own thoughts for it. They remained sitting by the water's edge, Lily's head on his shoulder, their hands linked, until the sun started going down and the first students began returning from Hogsmeade. Then Lily extricated herself from him and, with one last squeeze of his hand, left him to sit there alone and try to commit every single moment of the afternoon to his memory, just in case it was the last one of its kind he got.

He spent time with Stone and his little group the next day – as was usual for the dark-skinned Slytherin, he was in the company of Ashley Morgan, the sixth-year Ravenclaw, and Stacie Monroe, the fourth-year Slytherin – simply sitting with them for a while, mostly quietly watching and decompressing, but also turning Lily's words about friendship in his head as he did so.

In spite of what Michael had said on Monday evening, they didn't seem to mind him, and more importantly, they didn't seem inclined to pull him into conversation either. With the finals over and done with, the books had been put away, and instead the cards had come out, a regular Muggle deck mixed in with a Wizarding one and charmed so that the backsides looked identical. They were playing a loose game of Old Maid, mixing in rules from the Crazy Wizard's Magizoo, and at the same time each one of them was doing something else – Mickey was practicing his sleight-of-hand with the discarded cards, Stacie was reading a book on finance management, and Ash was apparently trying to figure out how to unlock a complicated-looking padlock without magic, with what appeared to be a burglar's lockpicking set. Severus himself had his Advanced Potion-Making book on his knees as he tried to figure out if there was some way to shave time off of the Felix Felicis recipe, though the three other people around him were proving to be a far more interesting occupation of his attention.

Pulling one of Ash's cards out of his hand, Stacie studied it, shuffled her own cards and extended her hand to Mickey, barely looking as he reached to take one out of her hand.

"D'you know, I'm really looking forward to being able to use magic at home," Morgan commented, making a face as his hand slipped and the lockpicking tools in his hand clattered against the lock. Looking older than his seventeen years, Ash Morgan had a high forehead that was wont to wrinkle when he was surprised, and he alone of the three had a noticeable Cockney accent. "Me dad's been talking about how much easier the business will be when I can help out."

"Ash, I thought we'd agreed," Michael replied, extending his cards to Severus, who picked the far left one and studied it; unfortunately, it wasn't a wizarding card, and he couldn't pair it with any other one in his hand.

"Yeah," Morgan agreed, putting down the lockpicking tools to take one of Severus' cards, even as he reached for the cigarette tucked behind his ear. Most of the kids who smoked tried to hide it, Severus had noticed; Morgan didn't. He just lit up and afterwards cast an air-freshening charm to disperse the smell of tobacco, but if any of the professors caught him at it, he was unapologetic and usually just answered their stern looks with a shrug. Sticking the cigarette in his mouth, he placed the Acromantula card on the table, making the rest of them groan. "Come on; shuffle them up."

"This is just cruel, Ash," Stacie admonished, but dutifully reached for Michael's and Severus' cards, putting them together with her own in order to shuffle and re-deal them. In answer, Morgan smiled and lit up the cigarette.

"Anyway, I'm not gonna use magic unless we're in a real tight spot," Morgan continued. "But I need him to take me seriously, if I want him to introduce me around."

"Just be careful," Michael said. "You have one more year here yet."

"Not like I need it," Morgan pointed out. "I might as well not come back, really."

"What, and leave us stranded here?" the girl protested, though she was smiling as she picked through her own newly dealt cards; she had a darker, sort of smoky voice, strongly-accented cheekbones, and deep laugh-lines around her attractively plump lips. "You love us more than that, Ash."

"Yeah, I do," the eldest boy agreed unselfconsciously, tapping the ash from his cigarette into an ashtray that he'd dug out of his bag while Stacie chose one of his cards. "And you'd be lost without me."

"Of course we would. Besides, having N.E.W.T.s may come in handy," Michael pointed out. "You never know how the future will turn out. We may want to retire back here someday."

"Oh, no," Stacie disagreed, raising her book slightly for everyone's notice. "I'm buying myself a house in the Caribbean one day and retiring there."

"Back here where?" Severus asked, frowning slightly.

"The magical world," Michael answered, smiling smugly as he placed down the Phoenix card, allowing him to pick a wizarding card out of the discarded pile he'd been twirling around his fingers. "We're slipping off to Muggle London as soon as we're all done with schooling."

Severus raised his eyebrows in surprise; he'd never run into any witch or wizard who'd even contemplated anything of the kind, let alone decided on it – and Michael did sound quite certain. He tried to fit that with his knowledge of the group as he played his turn (he wasn't significantly worse off than he'd been before reshuffling, and the card he took from Michael was an eight, which meant that he could put down a pair, always nice).

"So, you still fighting with the Gryffindor princess?" Stacie asked just as Severus opened his mouth to ask Michael why in Merlin's name he'd want to leave the wizarding world. He closed it, licked his lips, then shook his head, extending his hand to Morgan.

"No," he answered quietly. "No, I'm not."

"Good. Reggie owes me five Galleons."

"Stace, did you _really_ bet with Regulus Black on whether Severus would make up with Lily Evans?"

"Easy money, Mickey," Stacie said, eying Morgan as the older boy debated between playing two cards and then finally decided on neither, instead offering his hand for her to draw a card. "He thought he had inside information through his brother. And she may be a righteous busybody, but she's also a bleeding heart, the odds were in my favour."

"And you wouldn't have minded encouraging them in your direction if needed," Michael added pointedly, making Stacie shrug as she put down a pair of queens.

"Severus is a friend; we help friends in need. Besides, with whom else could I have made the bet, hm? Your fellow yearmates, perhaps?"

That startled a laugh out of Michael, and an agreeing shake of his head.

Ignoring Stacie's mildly disturbing comment, Severus still couldn't stop worry from starting to gnaw at him. The fact that people only tangentially connected to Severus were taking such interest in his and Lily's relationship could create problems down the line given his new job for Dumbledore; he'd not really thought much on it, given everything, but perhaps it would be smarter if he and Lily kept their friendship quieter from now on. That Regulus of all people had noticed it – Severus and Regulus had a cordial sort of relationship, where they exchanged favours and didn't get in each other's way, but they were hardly more than acquaintances – meant that interest in him wasn't contained to his own yearmates, and that was bound to make life even more difficult for him in the coming years.

"I'd rather this information not be spread around," he told them, eying each of their hands; they were practically all down to two or three regular cards, and Severus wasn't the one holding the lone queen, though as the pairs got discarded, the odds of him picking it up were increasing. "It's... safer, for all involved. And besides, we may not be fighting, but I'm not sure where we stand, either."

"That's all right," Stacie assured him. "I can spin it easily, we didn't specify the precise terms. Reggie's a bit too trusting for his own good, he could use a good lesson on that front."

Morgan snorted. "You'd expect a Black to know better."

"He's too soft-hearted for that family," Stacie sounded genuinely sad. "They'll grind him to dust. Too bad he doesn't have our way out; he could use it, I think."

Given that she was his year, Severus had to take the brunette's word for it; his own impression of Regulus Black was that the boy was extremely intelligent but surprisingly cautious given the arrogance he exhibited that was so typical of the high-society Pure-blood children. He didn't dislike the kid, per se, but he also never felt any true interest in getting closer to him, though perhaps it would have been useful – in large part, this was also because of his older brother, with whom Regulus still appeared to have regular interactions. Severus had no intention of getting anywhere closer to Sirius Black than he had to.

"Why are you planning this, exactly?" Severus asked instead, seeing his chance to get the topic back to what interested him as he smiled at the Unicorn card he'd stolen from Michael; that card would allow him to give any single one that he wanted to another player, according to the rules of the Crazy Wizard's Magizoo they'd adjusted for their specific purpose. "Living in the Muggle world?" He made sure to tuck the card as carefully behind the others as he could while he shuffled them, so that Morgan wouldn't easily take it off him.

"Well, things are promising to become uncomfortable for people with strong ties to the Muggle world in the near future, and it's not like the wizarding world has given us all that much in the long run. For what we're interested in, magic is the easy way, and I think we all agree that easy is also boring."

"Right. We'll make our way without magic," Morgan said, putting out his cigarette as he frowned over his cards.

" _This_ kind of magic, at least," Stacie added with a light smirk.

"Is petty theft the most you aspire to?" Severus had to ask, feeling quite dubious given everything he'd learned about the group so far. He knew they fancied themselves grifters; he'd spotted them fleecing plenty of gullible people in and around Hogwarts over the years. But he'd gotten the impression, in the last few months, that Mickey Bricks was interested in bigger and better things than that. He'd never spoken of his father again, but some of the group's conversations had wandered quite close to familial issues during one or two times that Severus had been with them to witness it, and there was definitely more to that story Michael had told at the beginning of the spring.

"We're not interested in any sort of theft, Severus," Michael retorted, frowning lightly. "Thieving is crude, brutish. Conning is a science. And the long con is the art form of the business. _That_ _'_ _s_ what we want to do."

"Long con?"

"Not simply in-and-out; long cons take planning, preparation, and investment, both time and money. But the payoff is also much larger. You have to get to know the mark, insinuate yourself into their life for a period of time, build up their confidence in you. With the long con, it's about finding people who want something for nothing, and then giving them nothing for something without them figuring you out before the score."

"So, what you've been doing so far are short cons, then?"

Morgan nodded. "Yeah. Easy enough with some of the people around here, and they can afford it. We're not gonna take from those who don't have any to spare, we're not crooks."

"We're still beginners at the long con, and we can hardly practice here," Stacie pointed out. "You see, Severus, the best ones are those where the mark never even knows they've been conned."

"But getting such a finish is hardly easy," Michael continued, setting down a pair of twos and extending his hand to Severus for the draw, "so the second best option is to make certain they'd not come after you, most often by making them either complicit in an illegal act or too embarrassed to go to the authorities."

"The problem with small places like Hogwarts," Morgan said, "is that eventually, everyone learns everything, so it's far safer to keep the long cons outside of the school except for special cases."

"And most hardly even notice the short cons, not really," Michael finished. "Even sleight-of-hand tricks and pickpocketing, if it's not something they would desperately miss, they may just think they've lost it or overlooked it. We need to fly under the radar."

Stacie's expectant look made Severus realise he was holding up the game, the conversation had been so engrossing. He took a moment to study what he'd taken off Michael, pleased to note that it was the five he needed. He put the pair down, left with only three cards: the Unicorn, the seven of aces and the three of clubs. One more round, and he was done, barring anyone playing something to upset his card number. Satisfied, he extended his hand to Morgan, who luckily took the seven.

"So why not stay in the wizarding world?" he asked once his turn was played.

"Same reason as Hogwarts; too small," Stacie answered. "We'd run out of marks soon enough, and they are all so interconnected that they'd figure us out very quickly, and then we're stuck with some unpleasant people wanting their money back, or worse. If we operate in Muggle London, then we always have the wizarding world to escape to, if the heat gets too high."

"Plus, the challenge is bigger. Using magic in the wizarding world is fine, but it would be overkill in the Muggle world. The trick is to make them give us their money with only our own brains as tools."

"You have this all pretty planned out," Severus noted.

"Yes, we do," Morgan noted quite matter-of-factly. "Mickey's a brilliant strategist, for all that he appears to do everything on the fly, and me dad's in the business, he'll help us establish ourselves once we relocate to London." He smirked as soon as Stacie had pulled a card from his hand, while the girl's only answer was a slight tightening of the eyes.

"It serves to have a plan," Michael said with a shrug. "And the way the wizarding world is going, we figured it'll be better to steer clear for a while."

Would that Severus could do that, too.

The corner of Stacie's mouth turned up and she showed everyone a Unicorn card – the second of the pair in the wizarding deck – before putting another face-down over it and pushing it across the table to Severus. Apprehensive, he picked it up and nearly groaned – she'd stuck him with the unpaired queen. Wonderful.

"Ta," Severus said darkly, shaking his head. "Can I ask you something and for you to give me a straight answer?" he asked the group at large to distract himself, tugging a strand of hair absent-mindedly away from his face. At least he had his own Unicorn card to get rid of the lone queen just as soon as Michael had played his hand. He was going to stick that card right back to her.

"Sure."

The look Michael was giving him was open and friendly, nothing like the way his other friends looked at him, except for Lily. It was surprisingly genuine, and it stirred up a crumb of regret that he'd never even considered befriending the other boy in the past five years.

"Do you... I mean, is this, what you have, a friendship, or a... a Slytherin friendship?"

Morgan frowned, but Mickey lifted his eyebrow in surprise and Stacie smiled; his fellow Slytherins had understood what he'd meant, even if he himself barely did.

"What does he mean by that?"

"Friendships in Slytherin are business arrangements," Stacie explained to the Ravenclaw. "Nothing like in our business, though. What he's asking is whether we're actual friends, or if it's about mutual gain. And, for your answer," she directed to Severus, "we are actual friends. These two've been friends since before Hogwarts, and I trust them with my life."

"To be fair," Michael said, "in our circles, business arrangements are a perfectly respectable way to build relationships, and so long as there's respect on both sides, these friendships can be just as genuine. _Clara pacta, boni amici_ and all that. Certainly that's the impression I got from Ash's father and honorary uncles."

"But you have to have people whom you can trust implicitly to be there for you in your worst moments and know they'd never use it against you," Morgan pointed out. "And trust is all the harder to come by in the seedy side of life. So what we've got, the three of us – that's the better kind, if you ask me."

Smirking, Michael put down the Basilisk card, and Severus cursed in his head; it was the game-ender card that made Michael an automatic winner, requiring them all to show their cards, pair up those that could be paired up, and thus reveal who it was that had the 'old maid'. And thanks to Stacie's sneak-attack, that was Severus.

He'd lost though he'd had the means to get himself out of it.

"Well, you know the saying..." Stacie said, a mischievous, knowing glint in her eyes. Still mildly upset, Severus frowned at her in confusion.

"Lucky in cards, unlucky in love."

Morgan laughed at Mickey's grimace, and Stacie smirked, though she sent a weighty look Severus' way that made him feel like shifting in his seat under her scrutiny; that one hadn't been entirely for Michael, it seemed to him.

The moment passed when the dark-skinned boy smiled his brilliant white smile and swept his arms out to collect the cards. Stacie's attention moved away from Severus to his fellow fifth-year, and there was softness and affection in her dark eyes beyond what Severus would have expected. He knew they were a close-knit group, but he'd not thought that anything beyond platonic was going on with the two until now.

After he'd shuffled the cards in a few fancy ways, most likely to show off, Michael gave Severus a measuring look, before leaning forward in his chair a bit. "You know, Severus, I'm not an idiot, nor am I blind; I wouldn't be good at what I do otherwise."

"Meaning what?"

"How about an arrangement? We'll help you keep your friendship with Lily Evans under the radar, keep an eye out for trouble on the _other_ front, and in return you keep silent on any business of ours you may pick up on, maybe help us here and there if we need it; you get a cut of the share, of course."

"All right," Severus agreed; as Michael had said, he was no fool – he'd figured out Severus' own long con on the other Slytherins within a day. And the other boy was a rare kind of Slytherin, indeed – the type that could mostly be trusted. Granted, there was always a give and take in most interactions when it came to their House, but on the whole, Michael had, in the last three months, been a better friend to Severus than any of the others, keeping his secret and helping him go unnoticed at a time when Severus had needed that help, even if he'd barely seen it for himself. Aside from the fact that having someone trustworthy on the outside, if it ever became necessary, was extremely valuable, Severus found that he truly liked Michael Stone, to the point that he thought being friends with him – the kind of friends Lily believed to be actual, true friends – might be very nice after all.

* * *

The Wolf never wants to give up control. It fights, always, thrashes and writhes and howls, and it submits in the end, too, always, because it doesn't have another choice. But it never goes peacefully.

The first month that it's too tired to fight is the month when three others join it for the first time, familiar yet not, their smells those of friend ** _pray_** familiar _wrong_. They stay for the whole night, play with it, distract it, rough-house and show no fear, and the Wolf is so distracted and exhausted by the end that it only belatedly remembers to fight once the control begins slipping its grasp.

The next time the Wolf seizes control, the Three are there again, and though their smells are the same, they're different to the Wolf, too, are friend _pray_ **familiar** _pack_. It's less leery of them this second time, it remembers, and it accepts their presence with more ease. The third time they greet it becomes the month of the Pack, because they are there again and they've become **_pack_** friend **familiar**. This month, the Wolf begins to feel content enough to let go. There is the promise of **_pack_** waiting when it seizes control again, and it's learned that things that happen many times can be often trusted to happen again and again.

Then the freedom comes, freedom and a chance to hunt, and the Wolf begins to learn happiness. Even when its packmates are confusing and distract it from its Hunt, when they refuse to understand and fight it, it's still happy. The Three make it forget about the Hunt, and they are all free to run and explore and play. It even willingly returns to **cage** _stale_ dark **magic** when the Three insist on going there, because its packmates may be a little dumb for not wanting to run, but they are **_pack_** and the Wolf knows to take care of **_pack_**.

Besides, the Other is allowed out of **cage** , and it's better when the Other is safe, because the Wolf and the Other are One, and so to harm one is to harm the other. Most of the time, the Wolf despises the Other deeply, because it refuses to accept that the Other is Alpha. The Other is weak; the Other flees when afraid, when the Wolf wants to fight, and _weak_ cannot, _should not_ be Alpha, but it is because the Wolf doesn't have a choice, and this makes it resentful.

The resentfulness becomes blurry after the Three appear, because the Wolf still smells them even when it doesn't have control, before and after **_freedom_** of control, when it's not forced to slumber, and the Other is the one who's given the Wolf the Three, the Other is the one who's found **_pack_** and allowed the Wolf its freedom for the Night.

So of course it's the Other's fault that the Pack is broken; the Wolf is aware when it happens, and it doesn't understand their strange yips and yowls and growls, but it understands the emotions in the tones and the smells and the sights, and it knows that the Other has been Banished from the Pack.

And even so, the Wolf hopes that the Three will still come, that they will not blame the Wolf for what the Other has done.

The only one who is there is **pack** friend ** _rat_** _boy_ , and even if there is **_freedom_** , there is no freedom this Night. The Pack is broken, the Other has broken their Pack, and the Wolf's Pack is the same as the Other's Pack, is the One's Pack, but the Wolf doesn't want it to be, and so it destroys everything and chases **_rat_** _boy_ around to feel better even if that's not what one does to **_pack_** and it scratches and gnaws and bites itself and pulls its own hairs out and makes itself bleed, because _hurt_ outside is better than **hurt** inside, and the Other will suffer when the Wolf loses control and the Other deserves it, the Other is to blame.

Soon after the Wolf starts feeling that the Night is ending, when it's tired but still angry and agitated and still **_hurting_** , it smells another, smells **pack** friend ** _deer_** _boy_ _ **Alpha**_ , and it smells _wrong_ , **_deer_** _boy_ smells wrong but smells right too, and the Wolf stalks it and fights it because **_deer_** _boy_ is late and is alone and is angry with the One, and **pack** friend ** _dog_** _boy_ isn't here, the one that Wolf wants most isn't here, the one that smells like **_family_** , and none of them want to be the Pack anymore so they shouldn't have come.

It makes sure to scare and hurt the other two, because they're **_pack_** but they're not the Pack, because they're here but they aren't here, because they made the **hurt** and the Wolf doesn't trust them anymore even if their smells try to make it.

And it makes sure to hurt and fight the Other until the very last moment, because it's the Other's fault that the Wolf's lost its Pack, and it's the Other's fault that the Wolf's had the Pack in the first place, and so the Wolf does not want to be peaceful within the One any longer.

It may not be Alpha, but the Other will _hurt_ for what's happened, even if the Wolf has to _hurt_ with it.

It's better than the **hurt** anyway, and though the Wolf and the Other are separate, they're also _not_ , they're the One, and the Wolf knows, understands in a strange _different_ way, that the Other thinks the same.

* * *

Dragging himself back to full consciousness was always a massive struggle for Remus, and it was that much harder this time, because he _ached_ in a way he'd not ached for months.

He didn't really remember the previous night, and in his state of near-unconsciousness, it was a little easier to hold on to the desperate belief that everything had been as it should have, everything had been fine and the boys had been there with him, even if the damage he could tell his body had sustained was telling him otherwise.

A warm, dry hand was gripping his, and the fingers squeezed, giving him a focus point that allowed him to wake up fully. He cracked his sticky eyelashes apart, opened his stinging eyes a little, hoping that it was one of them, though his nose had already told him that it wasn't.

Lily's face was blurry in his vision, and he recognised her by her smell instead of her looks. When he shifted in bed, she hurried to help him sit up a little, just enough to drink a bit of water to soothe his parched throat.

His cheek hurt worse than the rest of him, and that was something, considering he felt as if chewed up and spat out by a canine, the way he'd not felt in months. Even drinking the water left him heaving for breath in exhaustion and his eyes falling shut.

He wanted to fall asleep and never wake up, wanted it so very badly. But Lily was here, _someone_ was here, and he wanted to see her properly, to assure himself it was her and not... well.

He blinked until his sight was a little clearer. Lily looked a mess; her hair was greasy, tied back haphazardly, and she looked wan and pale, tired and with deep bags under her eyes.

"Hey, Remus," she said quietly, settling back in her chair and taking his hand in hers again. "How are you holding up?"

Remus tried to smile, because she was here, _someone_ was here...

Except it wasn't _them_ , it wasn't James and Sirius and Peter, it wasn't...

They'd been there, by his side, every single morning after of every single school month, for four years, _four years_ , they'd always been there, _always_ , and now...

They really had given up on him.

His smile ended up a grimace, and he couldn't let Lily see it, wouldn't, she didn't deserve...

He turned his head away from her and squeezed his eyes as forcefully as he could, biting his lip to keep the sounds in, and his face _hurt_ from the cramp of his facial muscles, but he couldn't get them to relax, couldn't smooth out his face, and the tears were salty sliding down onto his lips and into his shirt collar, refusing to stop as his insides yawned with the gaping _loneliness_ of James', Sirius' and Peter's absence.

Lily didn't say a word, just squeezed his hand tightly and held on, even as Remus battled with his tears and lost. She held on as he cried himself silently into another doze, and when he woke up again, she was still there, still holding his hand.

"I'm doing some research on charmwork," she said quietly, voice a little hoarse. "Do you want me to read aloud?"

"Yea–" Remus' voice broke, and he cleared his throat, shifting gingerly to the side a little and wincing as pain shot up his thigh; the wolf must have been chewing on its hind quarters. He wanted to sleep and never wake up again, wanted to sleep and forget that his friends were no longer his friends because he'd stood up to them for their own good, wanted to sleep and stop feeling like that had been the biggest mistake of his life. "Yeah."

Lily bent down and rummaged through her bag until she found a tattered old book she must have picked up from the library. Settling back in her seat, she rested her left hand on Remus' wrist and settled the book in her lap on the right, before clearing her throat.

"The magical theory behind the weight-changing spells was pioneered by Spurius Herminius Aquilinus, a Roman wizard who is believed to have lived around the fifth century BC..."

Remus listened to her for as long as he could, but her voice was soothing and it soon put him back to sleep. He dozed on and off for the rest of the day, and every time he woke up, Lily was there, sitting by his side and reading, or conversing with the seventh-year Ravenclaw who'd been attacked before the O.W.L.s and now resided in the hospital wing. She never asked about the others, never intimated that she was there because they weren't, and as Remus came back to himself more and more fully, he almost started to think that she wasn't, that there was something more going on with her and her presence by his side was for her sake rather than his.

But that was a painful thought in itself, and he let it go; Lily wasn't the type to use people, or at least, she wasn't the type to be motivated by such thoughts even when she had them. If being here and sitting by Remus' bedside, reading in silence, gave her something she needed, then Remus was glad that he could return the favour, because no matter how much pain he was already in, how much _loneliness_ he felt, at least there was _someone_ who cared, someone who thought he mattered enough to spend their day with him on his second hardest day of the month.

He was more grateful to her than he'd been to almost anyone in his life, for that day of silent camaraderie.

* * *

Lily left Remus in the hospital wing around nine that night, after she'd been assured by Madam Pomfrey that he was unlikely to be waking up until the morning. She trudged up the many staircases to the Gryffindor quarters up on the seventh floor, blind to the people around her, head in a fog of dull pain and confusion and exhaustion.

The Common room was lively and loud when she slipped in, and she had no strength left to engage with any of them, not even Potter and Black, who'd as usual taken up one of the seating areas and were surrounded by those who seemed to have sniffed out the discord in their previously tightly knit group and were now circling the waters like sharks on the trail of blood.

Remus' devastation had given Lily new insight into something she'd, until now, never even truly thought of – the cost of friendship.

Friendship meant so many things. It meant all those descriptions she'd given Severus yesterday, it meant a connection to another person, it meant the opposite of loneliness, it meant the essence of one's interaction with the world around oneself and the individuals in it. But what she'd never truly appreciated, before this weekend, was the fact that friendship didn't come free. True friendship, deep friendship that bound two people irrevocably and unquestionably, that sort of friendship had a steep price. It meant an emotional investment that couldn't be protected, it meant the risk of opening oneself to horrible, incorporeal pain, it meant a leap of faith and trust that never guaranteed a safety net.

It meant looking at a person and knowing that no matter how well you thought you knew them, they could still betray you and disappoint you and destroy you, and making that step into the unknown in spite of it, with only the hope that you'd judged them correctly, that they'd not do it, that they'd appreciate you as much as you appreciated them and would thus not discard you and break you in the process.

And in not understanding this, in never seeing it, Lily had done exactly that, not only to those who held her closest in their hearts, but also to those who didn't. She'd begun judging without listening, had begun demanding without giving back, had started to value the surface instead of the depth and had lifted herself up above those around her.

She didn't know why or how. She couldn't see it right, couldn't grasp how this had happened and she'd not even noticed until now, how her thinking had grown so callous and careless and self-righteous. She just knew that she didn't want to be this person anymore, didn't want to misunderstand and hurt and disappoint, and yet she didn't see a way out of it, didn't see a way of fixing this without losing everything she still valued about herself, everything that sparked her inner fire and pushed her and made her feel good about herself.

Lily wanted to go _home_.

Home was safety and her mother's praise and her father's advice, home was warmth and Petunia's rare approval and Severus' quiet adoration, home was good books and bad movies and a world with only an inner magic, home was the only place where things always, _always_ made sense, even when they didn't. At home, she knew, she'd be able to put herself back together. At home, she'd be able to sort it all out and fix it so that she was still herself and yet not, that she was who she wanted to be and who she couldn't help being. At home, she'd be better.

But there was another week to go, and she didn't know how she was going to make it. She _was_ , of course; she was a Gryffindor, and she'd never been the one to stop doing, to stop going, to stop pushing. She just...

She just probably wasn't going to make it through very well.

She dropped onto her bed with a sigh, rubbing absentmindedly at her breastbone towards her left breast, where a permanent ache had settled itself yesterday morning. She wished Severus was here, wished that he'd hold her again and let her rest against him. She wished that the echo of that 'Mudblood' didn't still faintly ring out in the back of her mind every time she thought of him.

"Lily?" Clotilde's voice, soft and worried, made her jolt and look up at the door to her dorm. "Are you all right?"

She tried to say 'yes' and the word stuck in her throat, until it turned into a lip trapped between teeth and a tear on its way down her cheek. Clotilde crossed the room and sat next to her, and her blue eyes roamed Lily's face searchingly.

"I'm so lost, Clo," Lily whispered, blinking as her sight blurred. "I'm... I've messed everything up and I've... I've been such a _horrible_ friend, to everyone, and I'd not even known it."

Clotilde sighed and pulled her into a hug, and Lily released a soft sob as she sank into her friend's embrace. She didn't want to cry. She'd cried plenty already, still felt utterly embarrassed and flummoxed by her own hysterics yesterday. But she was also still exhausted by the sleepless night and the day's vigil, and there was no way to hold back the tears that came.

"It'll be all right, Lily. You'll figure it out."

And Lily felt so _grateful_ , that Clotilde was the type who wanted to know everything, always, but never asked outright, never demanded to be told.

The other side of the bed dipped, and gentle fingers pulled her hair away from her face.

"What's wrong, Lils?" Bettina's quiet inquiry was unassuming and gentle, the girl kneeling by Lily's feet and resting her hands on Lily's knees in support. Lily reached out blindly with her hand and Mary tangled their fingers together, squeezing tightly, while with the other hand, she tucked Lily's hair behind her ear.

"I'm sorry," she told the other girl, pulling away from Clotilde enough to peer over. "I'm so sorry for being rude and snappy with you. You only ever look out for me, and I didn't even appreciate it."

"It's all right," Mary answered. "I'm not mad at you."

"You should be," Lily insisted. "All three of you. I've been... in my head, so much, and, and... not appreciating you, not... not being a good friend to you..."

"You're a silly," Bettina told her with a small smile. "We're not going to be angry with you for something like that, don't you know?"

"This year has been hard for everyone," Clotilde said.

"Alice being gone..." Clotilde began.

"Our exams..." Bettina continued.

"Mulciber's attack on me," Mary added.

"The war."

"What happened to Clara and her friends."

"Your fight with Snape."

Lily sniffed, closing her eyes.

"I thought you were happy about that."

"We'll never be happy that you're in pain, Lily," Clotilde said with conviction.

"Yeah; we may not agree with your friendship with him, but we don't want you to be hurting," Bettina agreed.

"And maybe we were too judgmental about it," Mary allowed. "So we won't let you take all the blame."

Lily smiled through her tears, squeezing Mary's hand in hers. "But you still disagree."

"I'll always disagree about it, Lily. But I never wanted _this_ , either, and if you're this upset about it, then he obviously means a lot to you and... I'll trust you a little more to know best."

"And I promise to listen to your concerns instead of just dismissing them," the redhead vowed. "I don't always know best, even if I think I do."

"Good," Mary answered, leaning forward to hug her, even as Bettina pushed herself to her feet to do the same, so that in the end, Lily was squeezed firmly between her three friends, whose warmth and presence felt like a balm to her aching heart.

She'd been a horrible friend to them as much as Severus, she'd dismissed their concerns and thought them trivial and dumb, she'd been defensive and abrasive in her interactions with them, but they were still there, still wanting to be her friends, still choosing to stand by her, and they gave her hope that she could find her way out of this maze of broken truths and destroyed convictions, gave her the strength she needed to find the start line and get going.

"I love you, Mary, Clo, Betts."

"We love you too," they chorused almost in tandem, giggling at themselves when they heard it, and Lily couldn't help but snigger softly with them.

It was a reprieve, she knew, just a momentary reprieve before the clouds drew back together, but it was enough for her to be able to breathe again, enough to allow her to get through the coming week with determination, if not conviction.

* * *

 **A/N:** I suppose it's about time to tell you that Michael 'Mickey Bricks' Stone, Stacie Monroe and Ash ('Three Socks') Morgan aren't my creation, but are the main characters of a British TV series called 'Hustle'; their background is naturally from the series in question (making this a slight crossover, I suppose), and I only adjusted some of their backstory and the rough estimate of their age to fit with my HP world. They'll stay as supporting characters throughout the story, but like all the other supporting characters (including Lily's friends and the Order/DE members, most of whom _are_ my creation) will continue to be an important part of the story. My main intent with the supporting characters is to weave a broader sense of the world they live in, rather than use them simply as plot devices, which does require me to expand on their agencies separate from those of my main characters. I hope they manage to win over those readers leery of OCs, but keep in mind that this is a marathon in my mind, rather than a sprint.

For those who may have found the Wolf's part confusing, the general rule (though not totally absolute) is that words in **bold** indicate an extremely strong sentiment; Capitalized words are 'names', as it were, denominating an actual entity of some sort; and _italicized_ words are emotional concepts that feel tangible to the Wolf. Therefore, there is a clear delineation between Pack and **_pack_** , or **hurt** and _hurt_. As for what this is meant to tell about Remus' condition, I leave it up to the readers, but I do have a plan in mind for expanding on the topic, just as I do with the Patronus Charm, Mind Arts and probably other mostly-canonically-vaguely-defined-but-potentially-complex concepts (such as the Dark Mark).


	16. Ch I,14: The Strengthening in Secrets

**Chapter 14: The Strengthening in Secrets**

Remus hated having to even enter his dormitory, let alone spend time in it. The very thought of it made him feel vaguely ill, because the tension there was so thick it could be cut with a knife, and the silence so deafening that it made him want to scream just to break it.

None of the boys had visited the hospital wing in the two days he'd spent there; Lily, having been there for what had seemed to Remus the entire Sunday, had come to visit between breaks on Monday, to bring him their summer assignments and simply sit with him. She'd been quiet, withdrawn; her face had been puffy, eyes a little bloodshot and bruised, and Remus had been able to smell the lingering salty traces of tears in her clothes. When he'd asked her gently about it, she'd only shaken her head and said that she wasn't ready to talk about it yet, so he'd let it go.

But James, Peter and Sirius, they hadn't shown up when he'd been awake, and Madam Pomfrey had only shaken her head when he'd asked whether they'd come in while he'd been sleeping. When he'd finally been released and allowed to return to the Gryffindor Tower, the tension had seemed to have ratcheted up even further in his absence. Peter now sent him furtive, sad looks but didn't approach him, and James looked like he was conflicted and trying to hide it, so he mostly kept his gaze away from Remus as much as he could. Sirius, though... Sirius was growing almost hostile towards him with each passing day, with hurtful throw-away lines and daggers in his eyes that only served to make him look almost unhinged, with the deterioration of his personal orderliness and his suddenly slightly jerky movements that he tried to hide by becoming more and more theatrical in their execution.

Remus felt like there was an iron fist around his heart and it was squeezing, squeezing until he was sure his innards would burst and he'd drown in his own blood. But he didn't cry; what tears he'd had to shed about this, he'd let out that first day in the hospital wing, and now he felt completely incapable, almost numbed as time went on. This was the new status quo, this was what finding his own tolerance limit had brought him, the bed he'd made and he had no choice but to lie in it, because he still couldn't find it within himself to be the first to capitulate in this standoff, couldn't find the will to continue looking the other way. He deserved this, he knew; he deserved it for being what he was and who he was, for making the choices he'd made. He'd had it so much better and easier than so many others carrying the same affliction, so many other boys and girls who'd not come to Dumbledore's attention and had not been invited to Hogwarts in spite of their lycanthropy. How had he dared think that he deserved even more, he didn't know, and it didn't truly matter in the long run, either, but a part of him knew that this was his due, and so it accepted it as such, leaving him with little will to fight it.

On Tuesday, after a nearly sleepless night, he escaped the dormitory at the crack of dawn and planted himself at the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall to wait for breakfast to be served, trying and failing to focus on how to improve the Marauder's Map. James had had it last, so Remus doubted he'd ever get his hands on it again, and he had no motivation to make another one given how much work had been put into this one, but the magical theory behind it was still as interesting as ever, and the monitoring spells he'd managed to place around Hogwarts were still his own, subject to his decisions and dependent on his relationship with Hogwarts' magic. It was one little thing, but he didn't want to let them have it too, wanted to be just a bit selfish and keep one last thing from his days as a Marauder, from the days when he'd been accepted, for a price he was no longer willing to pay.

Lily joined him, still looking just as exhausted as over the weekend, though a bit more settled. She ate little, but at least seemed to have more appetite than Remus himself. They didn't really talk much, just murmured small-talk focusing on their O.W.L.s and their plans for the summer, and Remus found himself wistfully envying her when she mentioned about being invited to Clotilde Babineaux's cottage.

By the time they'd both finished, the remaining fifth-year Gryffindors had begun arriving, and her eyes went flat and cold when she saw the ugly look on Sirius' face.

"Let's get out of here," she said abruptly, turning over on the bench quite forcefully. Remus followed her, far more subdued, feeling his shoulders hunch already as they passed the remaining Marauders.

"Careful, Evans, you don't want to be spending your time with traitors," Sirius threw out loudly enough for half of the table and probably a good number of Hufflepuffs to hear, vaulting one leg over to straddle the bench.

"I guess it takes one to know one, Black," she said back, giving him a disgusted, disdainful look. "So you can just keep your advice to yourself, because I don't listen to people who see nothing wrong with assaulting others for their own fun."

"Lily–" James began, and she turned to him with narrowed eyes.

"Lily, come on," Remus said softly, briefly touching her elbow with his hand to divert her attention. "Let's just go."

"No, Remus!" she replied vehemently. "You do not have to tolerate their horseshit just because they've decided to be arseholes to you."

"You've got that all wrong, Evans," Sirius said with a vicious smirk on his face. " _We_ didn't decide that; _he_ started this."

"By calling you out on your abominable actions."

"Do you go around policing everyone like this, or are we just that special, Evans? It's a really unattractive quality, you know; even your panting puppy-dog Snivelly seems to have caught on, has he? I hear you two've had a falling out. Wonder how that's going."

"You shut up, Black, about things you know nothing of," she hissed, her whole body going rigid, though Remus could almost smell the tears she was doing a very good job of hiding.

"Just as soon as you do," he shot back with a growl.

Most of the nearby Gryffindors were watching the confrontation with growing interest, and the tension was only ratcheting up with every second that passed. Swallowing, Remus put his hands on Lily's shoulders and gently guided her into a walk in the direction of the entrance; she resisted for a moment before stiffly submitting, perhaps because she seemed to be slightly trembling under his touch and didn't want them to see.

He was so focused on Lily, in fact, that he completely missed the leg shooting out into his path. Tripping, he stumbled and only Lily's slighter frame right in front of him kept him from kissing the ground. She released a soft 'ooph' and startled badly, but managed to keep her balance against his greater weight, though it did result in Remus' hand ending up dangerously close to her breast as he sought his footing.

Lily's stormy expression told Remus everything he needed to know, and he refused to look back. He knew what he'd see – Sirius' expression stretched into a savage, self-satisfied grin, and a challenging glint in his eyes.

He was not in the mood for rising to his former friend's challenges today. He just wanted to get through the next few days and go home.

"Very mature, Black, really," Lily shot with an unimpressed expression. "I didn't know you were five." She rolled her eyes, Sirius' actions apparently reminding her that she'd been the one to suggest they leave in the first place, and this time it was she who grabbed Remus' elbow and almost tugged him with her, away from the Marauders.

"Better watch your neck, Evans!" Sirius hollered after them. "You wouldn't want to have it exposed around Remus in one of his bad moods!"

Remus could just barely make out James' hissed "Padfoot!" before they rounded the stone wall and he started feeling like he could breathe again. As always, James' interventions were too little, too late.

Lily, eyes closed, inhaled and exhaled forcefully a few times, before nodding lightly to herself and looking back at Remus with dry eyes. He offered her a tired look and without another word, they wandered up the spiral staircase into the castle depths, away from the heat of the day and the judgmental, betrayed look of the Marauders.

"Why do you let him say such things?" she asked quietly.

Remus shrugged, not quite sure how to answer that question. It wasn't like he could change it, so much as he wanted. Sirius was just being Sirius; he'd not said a word against such actions when they'd not been turned on him, so it was only fair that he suffer like the black-haired boy's other targets.

"He's Sirius; it's what he does."

"And you're letting him! They can't just keep treating you like this, when they're the ones in the wrong!"

"It doesn't matter."

"How? How can it not matter? You've been friends for five years! Or was that just a convenient excuse for them?"

Remus' eyes fell to his shoes as the last ten days flittered through his mind – the tense silence, the hostile looks, the fact that in one night, everything he'd thought of as true was gone, wiped clean off, and his friends – _former_ friends – didn't seem even a little bit broken up about it. What Lily had said was exactly what Remus had been trying to avoid admitting to himself, and now was forced to face: if it was so easy for them to dismiss him, to turn from friend to foe, then had he ever truly mattered to them at all?

He screwed his eyes tightly shut and bit his lip to keep his composure, but he couldn't stop the hurt from suffusing him and turning his insides to ashes. Things were not going to get better, that much was being made perfectly clear to him – Sirius was making sure of it at every opportunity – and Remus didn't know what do to about it, because it was as if the ground was breaking up under his feet, as if he was drowning and didn't even know which way was up.

It felt like this enormous thing, this bubble that he'd been living in for so long, was bursting around him, and he'd forgotten it for what it truly was – just another delusion woven out of his own desperation and the whims of entitled teenaged boys.

He heard Lily exhale loudly, and a moment later, there was a hesitant touch on the side of his neck.

"I'm sorry, Remus," she said sorrowfully, with obvious self-reproach. "Merlin, I keep making a mess of everything. I'm sorry, I didn't mean..."

He shook his head, suddenly able to breathe again. He wasn't alone. _He wasn't alone_ , not completely. Lily was still there, a friend he'd made on his own initiative, a friend who'd chastised him and shamed him about his own horrid actions and yet had forgiven him in what capacity she'd had for such a thing.

It wasn't even close to enough, it'd never be... but it was something, at least. It was the best he had, and so he'd have to make the best of it.

"You're right," he said, voice strangled, shoulders rising in a brief shrug. When he finally opened his eyes and looked up, there were tears in her eyes that stung him to the quick. "I probably _was_ a convenient excuse, or maybe they were just being charitable towards a poor little monster to make themselves feel important."

"Don't, yeah? Don't say that about yourself. You're not a monster."

"I'm a Dark creature, Lily. One night a month, I turn into a savage animal that only wants human blood. What else would you call that?"

"That's your condition, Remus, not _you_. If you want to call yourself a monster, then you do so according to _your_ actions, not the curse's. And you've not done anything to merit that epithet, I promise you."

"You know better than anyone that's not true." When she frowned, Remus took a deep breath to gather his strength, and ploughed on. "You were the one who made me see it. Maybe it's not as bad as what the Death Eaters do, but it's bad enough."

"Yes," she agreed, sounding reluctant, "but you're trying to change, and that has to count, especially if you're comparing yourself to them. Just... don't let your condition rule your mind, that's all I'm saying. You're much more than your curse, or your past actions."

Remus, as much as he disagreed, knew to let it go; maybe this was just Lily trying to sort out whatever was causing her anguish, or maybe she was just being her usual compassionate self, it didn't matter either way. She could never understand this about him, and for that he was grateful, but it also meant he knew how frustrating and futile continuing the conversation would be, because he could not accept her words, and she'd not be willing to accept his.

At least she was trying _something_ , though. It was so much more than what James, Sirius and Peter were doing, and it held all the more value for it.

In fact, right at that moment, it felt like _everything._

"Let's skive off the first class," Lily suggested, and Remus blinked in surprise at her. "What?! Skiving is fun! I can be fun!" she insisted in what was so obviously forced cheerfulness that Remus actually surprised himself with a short bark of a laugh.

"Well, we might as well do it once in our lives; why the hell not."

So they did exactly that, and ended up in the southern part of the castle, up on the sixth floor near the attic classroom. Neither Lily nor Remus were taking Divination; Lily thought it hogwash, and Remus was of the opinion that it was an art, not a science, which meant that learning it if you didn't have the talent was not even close to worth it.

They peeked into alcoves and behind busts, suits of armour and tapestries, and it actually helped Remus; Lily asked him to explain the Map's spells, and in spite of the association that it always held in his mind, Remus actually quite enjoyed sharing all his various discoveries about the basal sentience of the castle, even more so because Lily, unlike James and Sirius, actually seemed as intrigued by the actual mechanics behind it as Remus himself was, in an intensely academic way that propelled their discussion into a new realm for him – one of almost professional analysis.

They found a hidden room behind an old painting with the help of some green dust, a little girl and Beowulf's Old English, and in it, an enormous, ornate mirror on clawed feet and writing carved into the frame at the top.

" _Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi_." They studied the writing for a moment in silence, before Lily spoke again: "Backwards? I... show not... yo...ur – your – facu– no, face! I show not your face, but your he-arts – hearts – desire. Ha!" she exclaimed triumphantly with a smirk. "I show not your face but your heart's desire."

There was nothing unusual happening with the mirror, though it was too narrow for the both of them to be fully visible.

"Maybe if only one of us stands in front of it?" Remus suggested, so Lily stepped out of the way, while Remus stepped a bit closer to his own reflection.

As he did, the scene in the mirror changed, and he saw not himself as he'd looked just moments ago, wan, gaunt, with dark circles under his eyes and wounds still healing on his face, but healthy the way he couldn't remember himself ever being, lightly tanned skin, straight shoulders and lightness in his green eyes. His parents stood to his right, his mother smiling in a way she never really did, with happiness that lit up the reflection, and his father appeared free of the ever-present weight of guilt and self-flagellation that had been there since Remus had been turned. To his left were James, Sirius and Peter, slinging their arms around him, clapping him on the back and smiling at him warmly. A pale light bathed the scene, coming from a large round ball in the topmost corner of the mirror, and Remus almost flinched when he saw it – the full moon.

Yearning twisted in his gut when it finally fully dawned on him what he was seeing, so powerful that he took an unconscious step forward and extended his arm to touch his own reflection.

"What do you see?" Lily's voice intruded, and he blinked hard a few times, trying to breathe through the ache in his chest.

"I... I'm not a werewolf anymore," he whispered. "And Ma and Dad... they look so young."

It was everything in that scene, of course, that hurt. But what hurt the most wasn't that his friends were there for him, or that his father was not bent under that to Remus incomprehensible weight, or even himself, standing hale and hearty under the light of the full moon – no, it was the smile on his mother's face that hurt the most. She, who was not of this wizarding world, who could never fully comprehend what the Curse meant for Remus, yet who'd always, _always_ been there for him, who'd always done her best, who'd kept their family from falling apart.

Remus felt in that moment like he'd give _anything_ to see Hope Lupin smile like that all the time.

A sharp tug on his lower arm jarred him out of his vision as he stumbled to the side. Exclaiming in surprise, Remus looked at the girl he'd all but forgotten, whose face was twisted into a grimace of apprehension.

"Remus, that thing's dangerous," she told him, digging her nails into his palm. Remus shook his head; he had to make her understand.

"But, I saw James and Sirius and Peter–"

"It's your desire; it's not real."

"But–"

"No, please. Let's just go back."

"Just look, would you? Then you'll understand."

"I don't want to," she said firmly. "I don't want to know my greatest desire, and I don't want to know how the mirror works, either."

"Come on, Lils–"

"No," she said, and from the pure steel in her voice, Remus grasped that he'd not be able to move her on this. "We're going back."

He resisted to an extent as she bodily dragged him out of the room and towards the stairwell, and only belatedly did he realise that his cheeks and eyelashes were wet. He'd been crying without even realising.

"All right," he said quietly, stopping his resistance and synchronising his steps with her so that they were walking at a more leisurely pace. No doubt she was right, that the mirror was dangerous.

But it wouldn't hurt to have just one last look later, when she'd gone to her dormitory; after all, they were all going home in a few days, what would be the harm, really?

* * *

Between learning to live with the paranoia, trying to find out anything useful for the Headmaster, juggling the divide between Thistletwaithe, Philes and Avery, dealing with Rosier's indirect overtures, stressing over O.W.L.s, worrying about his friendship with Lily and flagellating himself over his own actions, to Severus, this last month of the school year was starting to feel never-ending, and all he wanted to do was put it all out of his mind and just rest for a little while.

It was not to be, though, not yet. Evan Rosier finally approached Severus directly on the last Thursday of the term; there had been two other seemingly insignificant encounters that Severus had recognised as overtures, but those were nothing compared to finding the seventh-year Death Eater waiting for him at a table near the entrance to the Common Room after he'd finished his classes.

The level of tension in the Slytherin quarters hadn't let up since last Monday, and it was particularly awkward in the fifth-year boys' dormitory, where three doublets were suddenly starting to spring up – without Mulciber, Avery was much more prominent to all the other boys, and his ruthless manipulations against his former best friend had them all on edge even weeks after the fact. Since Mulciber's attack on Jones, Philes had re-established his connection to Avery until they seemed like inseparable bosom buddies. Meanwhile, Thistletwaithe had chosen to ally himself with Severus, not nearly so eager to forgive Avery putting him in danger with the attack on the seventh-years. Jones was as defiant as ever, bordering on gloating that he'd managed to get Mulciber arrested, and while Michael wasn't outright supporting him, it was obvious that he wasn't standing by either of the two pairs. There wasn't much time for it all to play out anymore, of course, with only a few days before they were all to leave for the summer, but it promised a hellish sixth year, especially given Severus' now very sticky situation.

Being approached by Rosier was what Severus needed to happen for his spying to be effective, yet it was also a big wrench in smoothing out the dynamics of the dormitory. Avery was bound to see Severus as a rival, but he was intelligent enough to know not to antagonise if it wasn't going to serve him a specific purpose; however, his thawing towards Severus could well alienate Thistletwaithe, which Severus didn't want, because if there was one person in their Voldemort-leaning group that Severus could easily stomach, it was their year's Prefect, and given that he'd shown willingness to defer to Severus, dismissing his loyalty was unwise bordering on idiotic. And, of course, there was Michael (whom Severus was starting to consider his first true friend after Lily, and so was unwilling to drop) and his obvious intent to stay out of it, which complicated matters even if the other boy was cognisant of Severus' true intentions on that front. Added to that was the question of where he and Lily would stand come their next schoolyear, and it was no wonder that Severus was more than a little apprehensive about September.

On his conversation with Lily last Saturday, at least, he didn't let himself analyse and ruminate, at least not beyond the academic conundrum of friendship. There was too much to consider, too much to think on, and his focus had to be on the Slytherin situation right now. In a few days, he'd be getting home, and then, when he was ensconced in his room avoiding his father, he'd have all the time in the world to break it all into individual parts and try to find a way of fulfilling his promise to her. _I know that one day, me being me won't be enough, and you'll find yourself using it purposefully on me, too –_ that wasn't something he could afford to think about when he was about to meet the leader of Voldemort's student faction.

Evan Rosier was a tall, dark haired wizard whose most prominent feature was an already well-established, trimmed beard, something that few male students at Hogwarts, even those in their majority, seemed capable of growing. His pale eyes were ever searching, and no one in Slytherin House liked to feel them on themselves, which had earned the seventh-year Slytherin Prefect a general attitude of deferment and submission. Rosier knew full well how to make use of that.

When Severus managed to weave through the crowded common room to the Death Eater's chosen table, he found that there was another boy sitting next to him, one that Severus was only mildly surprised to see, given his standing within the Slytherin Elite – Kennard Wilkes, a sixth-year Pure-blood Slytherin who was most notable for having climbed up the Slytherin social ladder past the children from more respected Pure-blood families to become one of the most prominent members of Rosier's group.

Wilkes was a stocky, square-faced boy, dark of skin and darker of eyes, with a flat nose whose wide nostrils dominated his visage. His athletic prowess was near-legendary in the Slytherin quarters; on the Quidditch Team as one of the Beaters since his second year, he was able to single-handedly knock out half of the opposing team if he so chose, and everyone knew to steer clear of him on the pitch. He'd taken over as their captain this year, and they'd not lost a single game.

Lifting his eyebrow, Severus seated himself across from the older boys and, casting a pointed look around them to the humdrum of the common room, pulled out his wand and cast a wordless _Muffliato_.

"What was that spell?" Wilkes demanded to know almost instantly.

"A privacy spell; my own creation," Severus answered. "We can speak freely, no one will notice. You can test it if you like," he added, a little pointedly, when the boy frowned.

Rosier and Wilkes exchanged looks before the younger of the pair did exactly what Severus had suggested, walking out of the perimeter of the spell and stopping close enough that he could still hear them speaking.

"So, how does it work?" Rosier asked.

"All he'll hear is indistinct crowd noises; much more discreet for a public setting, and considerably easier to cast than some of the more common privacy spells."

Lifting his finger, Rosier called Wilkes back, and Severus renewed the spell to include the stocky boy, making a mental note to see how the necessity of this could be avoided whilst keeping the integrity of the spell intact.

"He's right; I couldn't tell what you were saying," Wilkes confirmed.

"All right," Rosier agreed, extending his hands to pull up his long sleeves slightly before resting his forearms on the desk and lacing his fingers together. "Impressive; I take it the talk of your dabbling in spell invention is true, then?"

"It is."

"That is quite a skill."

"We all have our strengths," Severus answered noncommittally.

"Magical theory _and_ potioneering. A right prodigy, aren't you?" Wilkes noted.

"So what if I am?" Severus retorted, straightening in his seat. "Does that bother you, Wilkes?"

"Me? Not in the least," Wilkes said, offering a wide, knowing smile with too many teeth. "As you said, we all have our strengths."

Deciding that engaging further with the boy would be a needless waste of time and thus unwise, Severus turned to Rosier. "Why was I... _summoned_ , then?" He made sure to sneer the word lightly enough not to offend, but still sharply enough to show his displeasure. Respect in Slytherin was a tricky thing to win, and Severus had had five full years to learn the ins and outs of gaining it, even though the sort of high level of respect he'd always yearned for had been in many ways unattainable to him until, ironically, the event that had made him not really want it anymore in those same ways. So, though his knowledge was more theoretical than practical in this, Severus felt relatively confident in knowing how to strike a balance between appearing weak and appearing belligerent – it wouldn't do to give the impression of subservience, not if he wanted to gain meaningful access to the Dark Lord's recruitment circle, but at the same time, he did need to show deference to Rosier at least, given his station as the leader of the group Severus was trying to gain access to.

It worked in his favour, of course, that he'd already left a very strong impression on the seventh-year, and as he'd hoped, Rosier took his comment well, the corner of his lip twitching.

"Your quick thinking during Mulciber's fuckup did not go unnoticed; I thought I might let you know personally. You've impressed me, and not many can do this."

"I did what I had to, to protect myself," Severus replied sharply. "And Mulciber was quite clear on whose orders he'd been working."

Rosier shrugged lightly. "My orders were quite clear, as well; he's gotten his just desserts for purposefully misunderstanding them."

"And good riddance," Wilkes added with a roll of his eyes. "At least Avery has more than mulch between his ears."

"Avery's pedigree speaks for itself; he will get far if he sticks with it. What I'm more interested in, Snape, is why I am only now learning of _your_ capabilities."

Heart picking up the rhythm, Severus clenched his teeth and considered how to answer; it would be a gamble either way, of course, but Rosier seemed like the type who could suss out his own truths and would thus see through any half-answers or deflections. Would he be more appreciative of a little cat-and-mouse game, or straightforward truth?

"Avery's on the in with your group; why don't you ask _him_ that." He scoffed. "That's right; why would he _ever_ associate with a poor Half-blood like me and actually brag about it? Forgetting, of course, that a third of his offensive spells are _my_ invention."

"You seem to dislike him," Wilkes noted.

"After dragging us into his revenge plot against Mulciber, I more than dislike him. As far as I'm concerned, he can go rot in the deepest of hells," Severus spat out, bitterness hardly faked at all.

After a moment of silence, Rosier pursed his lips and nodded.

"Yes, I can see what you mean. Good thing that Avery is no longer an intermediary between us, then, Snape."

"He isn't?"

"Would we be sitting here and speaking if he were?" Wilkes asked dryly. An obvious fan of sarcasm, that one, Severus thought to himself.

"What are your plans for after Hogwarts?" Rosier steered the conversation in a different direction, and Severus gamely let the previous topic go, tentatively counting it as a win for himself. His hands were moist with sweat, but they were steady where he rested one on the table and the other in his lap, his wand kept hidden from view, and it was barely necessary to remind himself that even if he wasn't playing the role of a double agent for Dumbledore, he'd still be having the exact same conversation – his true motives changed nothing about his approach, and this was one of the conversations he'd been meticulously planning for years now. All he needed to do was remain focused, which he could do now that what had happened last Monday was no longer hanging over his head.

"Potions mastery," he answered Rosier's question. "It's a demanding field, financially rewarding and, of course, useful in a number of _other_ ways," he concluded with a pointed look.

"From what I've been told, Slughorn does not seem inclined to sponsor you."

Severus shrugged, more nonchalantly than he truly felt about the whole thing. "Even if my testing scores don't convince that bloated excuse for a teacher, they'll be more than enough for a true Potion's Master."

"You certain of that, Snape?" Wilkes questioned.

"As certain as I can be. A connection to... smoothen the way... would be better, of course, but my apparent friends so far don't seem inclined to be offering any such thing, do they now?" he asked rhetorically.

"Yes, that incident by the lake last week was quite an interesting one," Wilkes agreed, and Severus felt his stomach twist painfully as he realised he'd walked himself right into that one. Fucking hell.

"Does this assertion extend to the Gryffindor Muggle-born, too?" Rosier asked, the lightness in his tone belying what Severus knew was a very pointed interest. And though he didn't add ' _And what is your relationship with her, in the first place?'_ , the implication of it was quite clear.

Burying everything that the merest thought of Lily invoked in him, Severus allowed a sneer to take over his expression.

"That Mudblood? She's outgrown her usefulness."

"Oh? But from what I've heard, you two had been thick as thieves in your first years here," Wilkes noted, leaning back in his chair and crossing his muscled arms over his chest. "Positively friendly. Dare I say it... the best of friends!"

Backpedalling was out of the question, so Severus scrambled to spin it without giving any outward sign of his growing panic; obviously, these two had gone for information to more people than just Severus' group. Damn it, he should have expected that, it should have been a no-brainer.

"As children; it's a mistake I won't be making again."

"Which one?"

"Thinking she was different from all the other Muggle-borns," he snapped at the taunt, voice taut as he pushed aside his roiling emotions and the disgust at speaking of Lily in this way. "I should have known better, of course, and she's quite convinced me of that, you can rest assured."

"So I take it you've been cured of this childish infatuation with the Gryffindor princess?" Rosier asked, voice growing cold and hard along with his pale eyes. For a moment, Severus had to fight with himself to keep eye contact.

He did, though; he kept his eyes locked on those too-knowing ones, when he answered: "Thoroughly. In fact, so thoroughly that I'm wondering why I've _ever_ let her keep me back in what I've wanted."

"And that is?"

That was it; the moment of no return.

"To prove my worth to the Dark Lord."

In the silence that followed, Severus fought to calm his heavy breathing and galloping heart, fingers clenching around his wand's handle under the table as he leaned forward on his left forearm that rested on the tabletop, while the two Death Eaters before him assessed and judged him. If he'd failed to convince them of the truthfulness of his intentions (and what irony was it that barely a month ago, this would not even have been a complete lie, yet now he had to _make_ it his truth), then his days as a spy were over before they'd even truly begun, because despite the fact that Rosier would be relinquishing his leadership role of the Death Eater recruitment group – and was that why Wilkes was here, because he'd be taking over next year? – Severus knew that door would remain closed to him, at least until he'd left Hogwarts and could perhaps appeal to his distant if lukewarm friendship with Lucius Malfoy.

Merlin, he hoped this was enough, because if he'd had to say all this about Lily for nothing but disappointing Dumbledore...

Finally, after what felt like eons, Rosier relaxed back in his seat.

"I've spoken with Lucius Malfoy, he's had several positive things to say about you, Snape, especially given how short an opportunity you had to ingratiate yourself with him."

"Meaning what?"

"You wanted to prove yourself to the Dark Lord; this is your opportunity."

Severus barely contained himself from breathing out in relief, though he couldn't stop his shoulders from slumping slightly. "So, this is an invitation, I assume?"

"Precisely. Kennard will take over from me next year, which, as I'm sure you've surmised, is why he is privy to this conversation. However, I am the one sponsoring you, and if you continue as you've done in the last month, then you will have my endorsement with the Dark Lord, as well, when the time comes. I would suggest that you do not disappoint me."

Severus nodded sharply, knowing better than to promise anything as silly as that he wouldn't.

"I will do my utmost to repay your trust."

"Make sure you do. Kennard will contact you with further information before the end of the week, and I will be in touch with you over the summer; as, I imagine, will Lucius, once he hears of this. I dare say he will be very pleased with your actions, Snape," Rosier finished, pushing his chair away from the table to stand up. "We're done here."

"See you around, Snape," Wilkes threw as a farewell, following the seventh-year away from the table, and leaving Severus to slump in his seat and finally breathe that great sigh of relief.

He'd managed it. He was in.

* * *

The beginning of the last week of the school year ended up being mostly a quiet one for Lily, that confrontation with Black notwithstanding. She wasn't feeling social in the least, and her closest circle of friends all seemed to understand that, creating a buffer between her and the rest of the world.

Lily didn't have too many true friends, per se – Severus, the girls, and now Remus. However, she was very friendly with most of the older Gryffindors, a decent number of the younger ones, and many other students as well, having always been open to helping out where needed and in general just conversing when people felt like it. In the last few months, as her friendship with Severus had become turbulent and unpredictable and as the O.W.L.s had started drawing near, she'd mostly cut down on her usual sociability, her mind too focused on other things. But now that everyone's exams were over and even the professors were mostly just keeping them in class to assign their summer reading and homework, the chatter among her wider circle of friends had started back up again whether or not Lily had felt up for it.

And even with her closest friends, things weren't smooth sailing, no matter how settled they actually were – she'd not spoken with Severus since Saturday, and, the air between them having been somewhat cleared, she missed him in a simpler, sharper way than before. But it was obvious that he was both busy and respecting her request for space, and in turn she gave him the same; there would be time enough in Cokeworth anyway. Remus was clearly in his own head as much as Lily, and her confidence in herself having been so thoroughly shaken, she felt hesitant and cautious when interacting with him, given the newness of their friendship. And since their emotional confrontation on Sunday evening, Lily's three girlfriends were acting almost as awkwardly with her as she was with them, as they clearly weren't sure how to handle her internal crisis and wanted to do what was best for her without Lily actually telling them what that best was – mostly because she didn't quite know herself.

Her emotions had settled quite significantly in the four days since her conversation with Severus, leaving her predominantly feeling unhappy and on occasion still weepy. She wasn't sleeping well and her appetite was down from what it usually was, which definitely contributed to the overall negativity of her mood, and it seemed that only Remus could match it enough to spend significant amounts of time around her. Bettina certainly had little patience for it, given how easily she was influenced by the energy of those in her surroundings, and Lily didn't blame the plump witch in the least for staying mostly away. They were all fully aware of Bettina's struggles with pressure and stress, and Lily found it far less upsetting to simply let Bettina approach her at her own pace, than to pressure her and potentially cause the smaller witch unnecessary distress.

Clotilde went the opposite way, trying to cheer Lily up and keep her mind off of the dilemma for the few straggler days of the school year, and being nosy in her usual indirect way – she rarely, if ever, came outright and _asked_ about something she wanted to know. Instead, Clotilde's usual _modus operandi_ was to keep the conversation light and peppered with hints and leads into what she wanted to know, with her subtlety depending on whom she was speaking with, what the information was that she wanted to learn, and how much she cared about gaining that information. When she was in a good mood, Lily found it either entertaining or an intellectual challenge, sidestepping it and making the older girl work for what she wanted to know. When she was in a bad mood, though, Clotilde's antics only frustrated her and made her wish for a straight question that she could respond to with either a concrete answer or with a solid 'sod off'. These days, Clotilde's attempts at distraction were leaving Lily about as exhausted as she thought Bettina felt with her. She tried to let Clo know in the nicest way possible that she was being a bit overbearing, though she wasn't quite certain how well the message was coming across.

Mary was the only one who thought the way forward was to talk through the problem with Lily. It was perhaps exactly what Lily needed – an outside perspective and motivation to decide how to proceed not only in working on herself but also in her friendship with Severus – however there was so much that Lily simply couldn't tell her, that every time Mary led the discussion in that direction, they ended up just stalling when Lily couldn't explain half of her own thoughts and emotions on the subject. And there was also some hesitance on Lily's part that was a leftover of her recent feelings of frustration and annoyance with her friend – apologies or no, the fact was that there _did_ exist a distance between them now that they needed to overcome in order for either of them to feel comfortable opening up to the other about something as complex and personal as Lily's relationship with Severus was to her.

So mostly, the three days after their big conversation were spent in a wonky state of push-and-pull motion that only made Lily long more for home. Some distance, she felt, would do everyone good, just like she felt that this was true for her and Severus as well, though there was a part of her that wanted to pretend the last few years hadn't happened, just so that things would go to the way they'd been at the beginning, when she could mostly ignore any nasty or negative comments from her housemates and neither of them were being pulled into the political unrest brewing on the horizon.

As Lily herself was opening a short note that one of the smaller owls had dropped on her plate during breakfast on the last Wednesday of term, Clotilde exclaimed delightedly: "I got a letter from Alice!" She scanned it, then smiled widely. "She thinks she can manage to come to the cottage in August."

"Oh, that's great!" Bettina exclaimed. "I've missed her."

"Does she say anything else? She's been quite silent this semester."

"It's meant for all of us, actually," Clotilde explained. "She says: _Dear girls, I am so sorry to have written so little in the past few months, life has gotten extremely hectic..._ "

The note Lily had gotten was from Jasper, asking her if she could meet with him, Clara and Amir later in the evening for a proper introduction with a sixth-year who'd actually be her guide to the wider populace of their secret group next year. Listening absently to the letter Clotilde was reading, Lily pulled out a quill and scribbled a note to confirm, before charming it to fly up among the flock of birds and land on Jasper's plate as if dropped by an owl.

" _...ank has already gotten a commendation from Alastor Moody himself, who told him that he was very impressed with his work on a certain case that I better not write down here. He is hopeful that he will be promoted from Junior Auror to Auror in a few more months, and I couldn't be prouder of him. He is finally proving his full potential to his father, whom I've not heard be so warm with him since I'd first met him, which gives me great joy, for Frank's sake especially, given how much he adores Mr Longbottom._

" _I must end here, I truly have no more time to devote to your letter, and I wish I could write you all individualised ones, but these past few weeks have been extremely strenuous, and I'm afraid the near future only promises more of the same. Please let me know how your O.W.L.s have gone when you get the results, if they arrive before we see each other at Clotilde's cottage. I send you all my love, and Frank's with it. Alice_. That's it," Clotilde finished, folding the letter again.

"That was a lovely letter," Mary decided, extending her hand for it. "Though I do wish she'd speak a bit more of herself and a bit less of Frank."

"You know how she is," Lily pointed out. "She always puts herself last. At least she chose herself a man who understands that."

"Yes, Frank really is very good for her," Bettina agreed. "Not like that Ravenclaw, what was his name..."

"Sebastian," Clotilde answered. "That was a little weasel all right; the best thing we could have ever done for Alice was to help Frank win her over. How anyone could see anything in _him_..."

"Well, he pretended to be in love with her," Mary pointed out. "And from what I remember, he could be very persuasive. Didn't he try to woo you, too?"

Bettina snorted, no doubt remembering that little fiasco. "His face was _priceless_ when she shot him down."

"No less than he deserved," Clotilde said, purposefully lifting her head in the most dramatic way possible and pointing her nose in the air as if something down below stank. "A weasel, I say."

Even Lily had to crack a smile; fourteen-year-old Clotilde with her first true dye-job systematically cutting down a seventh-year had been the single best moment of Lily's third year, and they were all right, the boy had fully deserved it, too.

Clotilde, being the most observant of the four, was the one to catch the change in Lily's expression.

"She smiles," the older girl whispered, bumping Lily's shoulder with her companionably. "I told you I would make you crack a smile, didn't I?"

"I'm doing my best," Lily answered her, trying to imbue as much positivity into her words as she could.

"What you need, hon, is for me to shock you out of your funk," Clotilde decided.

"You've lost your ability to shock me back in my third year, Clo."

"Oh, I still have something up my sleeve, you'll see."

"Well, if that doesn't work," Lily promised, fully intending to stand by that promise, "I'm certain I'll be much better company by the time our vacation rolls around."

She went to meet Clara, Jasper and Amir that evening, and found the former two in a duelling room on the fifth floor of the southern wing of the castle, that, as far as Lily knew, wasn't being used for much of anything currently. By then, she'd started quite looking forward to it, because for Lily it promised to be a much-needed break from her own woes. Politics were a relatively safe topic, currently still far more in the realm of academia than the real world, which meant that she could immerse herself in it, debate on something that interested her very much, and learn beyond what they were being taught or what she'd read. Politics didn't care about her problems, and finding ways of grasping the complexity of the current political atmosphere was an excellent distraction that engaged her intellect to the fullest.

When she entered the designated room, Lily found Jasper and Clara playing Exploding Snaps, the girl heartily laughing at the boy, who had a comically pouty expression on his face. Noticing her, Jasper waved at the Gryffindor, his expression immediately morphing into a friendly smile.

"Am I early?"

"A bit," Clara answered. "But the other two will be late anyway, so you may as well get comfortable."

"Exploding Snaps?" Jasper asked, his voice a raspy shadow of what it used to be.

"Why not."

Amir joined them soon after, and they spent the evening playing cards and doing exactly what Lily had wanted to do during the evening – discussing politics. Amir's father was well-connected within the Ministry, which meant that the Head Boy had an enormous wealth of knowledge and interest in the current situation. From what Lily understood, his family was in the trade business, primarily import and export with the Middle and Far East, so political connections were almost a necessity given just how whimsical and downright temperamental the foreign relations departments in the Ministry could be. By the end, Lily was starting to think that she might actually like the somewhat unapproachable seventh-year; he was patient when she didn't understand something, and obviously had a very clear fondness for his two friends.

And she also learned something new about Clara – the Ravenclaw was more than a little interested in law, and from what she told Lily, she had a damn good reason. According to her, the judicial system was shockingly incompetent and under the influence of politicians, and to say that the seventh-year was angry was an understatement, especially given that they themselves would be part of one such judicial process, namely Mulciber's trial. They weren't very hopeful about it, as they were expecting even the punishment for his proven and eyewitness-supported casting of an Unforgivable to be mostly ameliorated from the legal sentencing of lifelong imprisonment in Azkaban, and when it came to the attack the seventh-years had suffered, there was no true evidence other than Mulciber's confession that he had been the one to do it, which immediately made the case shaky – if the confession was in any way successfully contested or excluded as evidence, there was nothing else to stop him from being cleared of those charges, not really.

They were winding down the card game (Jasper was in the lead with three out of six games won) when the knock on the door finally announced the last person they'd been waiting for. Lily's mouth fairly dropped when she turned around and actually saw who her contact was.

Clotilde did say she could pull off one more shock before the end of the year.

"You!"

" _Mais oui, mon amie_ ," Clo answered, grinning like the Cheshire Cat from _Alice in Wonderland_. "Admit it. I can too still shock you."

"You..." Lily jumped from her seat and marched over to the taller girl to smack her on the shoulder. "Why didn't you _tell_ me?!" Then, suddenly overcome with giddy excitement, Lily hugged her tightly.

"Well, we're a _secret_ society for a reason, Lis," Clotilde answered with a laugh, squeezing back for a moment before patting Lily on the shoulder. "There, there. A good kind of shock, isn't it?"

"The best," Lily answered truthfully, not even finding it within herself to be the least bit upset with the other girl for having hidden her involvement from the rest of them.

Clotilde joined them for a few more rounds of Exploding Snap, though she insisted on it being a regional French variation that her cousin had taught her, where a good deal of bluff was involved and the cards exploded in one's face if they were caught lying. By the end, the score was tied between her and Jasper, and Lily felt lighter than she had in weeks.

On their way back to the Gryffindor Tower, Clotilde offered an explanation.

"I was brought in by Alice, who was in turn introduced to the group through Frank. Usually, it's the seventh-years bringing in the younger ones, though it's not exactly a rule. The only real rule is that the students have to be over fifteen years old, so no younger than fourth-years, and they need to be trusted, especially now, which is hard to come by, given the rise of _Le_ _Prétendant de la Mort_."

"Did you... I mean, have you ever thought about picking someone?"

Clo, of course, immediately saw through Lily's stumbling words.

"I thought about you and Mary – Merlin knows I love Betsy, but she's not made of hardy enough stuff for this – but you never seemed all too interested, and..." the older girl stalled for a moment, discomfort flashing over her features, "well, we all know where Snape's leanings are."

Stung, Lily stalled in her step; not about Severus (though that hurt in an entirely new way now that she was actually aware that his allegiance was to her side rather than Voldemort), but about the fact that the most observant of her friends didn't realise her interest in fighting the war had crystallised to the point where she was deliberately attempting to make it a reality.

It was just another indication that there really was a new distance between her and her friends, one that was of her own making. In the pursuit of her wants, Lily had truly never even thought (let alone considered) to include her girlfriends. Even if they would have wanted nothing to do with it, as was most certainly the case for Bettina, she should have at least shared it with them because it was something she was interested in nowadays. Instead, she'd argued with Severus and talked to Remus about it, genuinely without it ever crossing her mind to mention it to the others.

"Lily?"

She shook her head, her good mood plummeting. "Would you've considered me if you knew I was interested?"

"If I'd known? Yes, of course. I like the people in the group, but I really hate constantly lying by omission to you," Clotilde admitted, almost as if spitting the words out. "When Jasper told me that you've been inducted, I didn't know whether to be more happy or shocked!"

"I never thought you had much of an interest in the war, either," Lily pointed out softly.

"Not the front lines like Alice, certainly," Clotilde agreed. "But there's benefit to not broadcasting it, too, you know. The group isn't all about creating a battle-ready resistance, it's about finding ways of making a better Wizarding Britain. Or at least, it is to me," she amended almost immediately. "Clara and I spoke about it recently, actually – neither of us wants to fight for Dumbledore's Order of the Phoenix, but we do want to contribute to the war effort."

"Why not, though? I mean, I don't know much about it beyond the recent rumours, but I certainly don't think we can put our faith in the _Ministry_ if this turns into a full-blown war!"

"Because there's a certain degree of blind trust to that organisation that we dislike. Dumbledore is a great man, I won't dispute it, but by definition, great men should not be trusted blindly, and I don't trust him on a personal level enough to want to involve myself directly with his secret, illegal organisation in a way that would permeate my whole life. Because that's what the Order is – or will be once it becomes known to the Ministry as an actual operational organisation. It's not government-sanctioned, and it doesn't share the same minute goals as the government, either. They can't control the Order any more than they can control Dumbledore, and you know how much political influence the Headmaster wields, certainly more than enough to make any Minister for Magic be wary, if not outright frightened."

Lily's instinctive response was to disagree, because she _did_ trust Dumbledore immensely, but then she remembered Severus' words and long pause about the way the Headmaster had gotten him to throw his lot in with the Light, and forced herself to remember and properly consider Clotilde's views at a later date, when she could speak with Severus more about it and make her own conclusions. She was trusting of the old wizard, of course she was, but she was also not so stupid as to think that Dumbledore was infallible; he was, after all, only human, just like the rest of them, no matter his magical prowess, political power, or sheer experience. And if blind trust ever did anything, it was hurt people, because it meant that they were raising the receiver of that trust on some sort of pedestal of perfection and were thus setting themselves up for disappointment when that person inevitably proved themselves to be less than perfect.

"So," she said instead, "we can't tell Mary or Bettina about this, can we?"

"No, more's the pity," Clotilde answered with a sigh. "Secrecy is the Order's tool as much as the Death Eaters', and that goes for the junior branches as well. It's a shadow war we're fighting, Lis, and if it goes the way I think it will, things will only get uglier and uglier. The attack on Amir, Clara, Jasper and Holland is only the beginning."

The worst part was, Lily was starting to agree with her on it. This was looking far less a civil rights issues in the form of a fight against a discriminatory group, and frighteningly more a full-blown ideological clash between an extremist bent on domination and the whole of Magical Britain, a clash that was promising to reshape their society and leave destruction in its wake either way.

She wasn't sure she was ready for it. Or that anyone else was, either.

* * *

On Friday evening, Remus' absence finally registered with Lily's overcrowded mind when he didn't show up for the Leaving Feast. The two of them had had the Ancient Runes class scheduled for that afternoon, which was let out after only ten minutes that the professor took to assign summer reading to those who were considering taking the N.E.W.T.-level class, and in the humdrum of a disorganised class and attempts at covertly passing a note to Severus about the train trip, Lily hadn't really noticed that he was missing. But, thinking back, she couldn't remember seeing his face in the crowd.

She excused herself as soon as the dinner was officially served, after Dumbledore had announced the winner of the House cup – Hufflepuff, for the first time in Lily's Hogwarts career – and went in search of her wayward friend. She spent a full hour looking for him before she thought to check the hidden room with the mirror they'd found on Tuesday, and there she found him sitting in front of that blasted magical artefact and staring at it with such glassy eyes that she felt dread travel down her spine.

"Remus, come away from that, please," she whispered. He didn't responds, and she thought for a moment what the best way would be to break his concentration, choosing in the end to sit next to him so that she was reflected, as well; almost immediately, he blinked and turned to look at her in surprise.

"How long have you been here?" she asked him quietly.

"What time is it?"

"It's almost half seven."

"S–" He blinked a few times and shook his head distractedly. "No, I just stopped by for a second, I promise."

"When?" she pressed.

"After lunch." He looked back at the mirror, and some of his dazedness gave way to dawning horror. "I've been here for six hours?!"

"Yeah."

"But it only seemed a moment," he murmured, and, heart clenching painfully in her chest, Lily reached for his hand.

"Remus, listen to me, ok? I know I can't possibly understand how hard lycanthropy is for you, especially now when James and Sirius and Peter are... well, especially now. But sitting in front of this mirror and watching what your life would have looked like had you not gotten infected won't lead to anything good, because you know better than anyone that this, the curse that you have, it's here to stay."

"I hate it," he whispered, hiccoughing on a sob. "It never stops, Lily, never, it's just month after month after month of weakness and blackness and pain and, and– it makes my ma miserable, and my dad can't even look at me without guilt in his eyes, and now James and Sirius don't even care anymore, and I have no one left, no one, and I know they couldn't change anything, but they helped, they helped so mu–"

His voice broke, and he began sobbing, burying his face in his hands and struggling for breath past frame-shaking sobs that Lily didn't think he'd allowed himself since that fiasco at the lake. So she did the only thing she could think of, the one thing that had helped _her_ when she felt like she was drowning – she pulled him into her arms and hugged him tightly to her chest, as his shoulders shook and the circular room around them echoed the pain in his desperate sobs, making her own tears wet her lashes.

And she wondered if this was how Severus had felt, in that week when all he'd known had been that she'd told him she was done with him. If this was how he'd felt, too, when she'd been the one crying and he, the one holding her.

"You have me," she vowed, whispering in his ear. "You have me, and you'll always have me, Remus. You are not alone."

Gradually, he calmed, his sobs quieting into simple heavy breaths, until finally he pulled back and went with his threadbare sleeve to wipe his runny nose; before he could, Lily reached for her magic and with barely a thought conjured a handkerchief out of thin air for him to blow his nose into instead.

"Thanks."

"Remus, did you try talking to them about all of this? Now, I mean, after they've had a chance to cool off?"

"But they haven't," he answered, shaking his head and sniffing as more tears spilled. "Sirius is only more and more angry with me, and James is too loyal to him to go behind his back, and you know Peter, he's only ever done what they do. The way he looks at me, Lily. Like _I've_ betrayed _him_ , by having a conscience and not being ok with what they were doing. And they obviously don't value my opinion at all, do they? All these years, being my friends and helping me every full moon, I thought it was worth something to them, but it wasn't, not really. And I'm trying to be ok with that, really, I am, so hard, but I just... I can't, sometimes." Angrily, he wiped at his cheeks. "I don't know how."

And Lily wished that there was something she could say to make it better, that she knew something to make everything all right. But the truth was that there was only one thing she knew, one thing she'd concluded in those days between Severus calling her 'Mudblood' and Dumbledore explaining it all, and that wouldn't help in the least.

She said it anyway.

"Remus, sometime people just can't be friends anymore. I thought Severus and I had been there, that we'd changed so much we couldn't possibly stay friends, but it turned out neither of us had wanted to change in those ways and so I guess we're not really there after all. But sometimes it's that way for real, sometimes the changes aren't bad, they're good, and when it's like that, there's nothing left to do about it but just say your goodbyes and move forward."

"But I don't _want_ to move forward, Lily! I want it to be like it was before."

"I know, I promise I know. But you... you're trying to be a different person, a better person, Remus, and maybe that person isn't able to be friends with them. So you need to know that you'll be fine even if you can't go back to how it was before. Trust me, you need to figure that out on your own first."

"Why?"

"Because... because then you'll know that it's truly worth it," she explained."You'll be able to fix it on your terms, not theirs, terms that'll work with the new you, this person you're trying to be. I... for years, I'd thought that I knew what friendship was, that I was a good friend. If nothing else, I'd thought myself a good friend when I'd put up with Severus becoming closer and closer to a group of people who'd as soon harm me as blink, when I'd continued trying and trying to make him see sense until it felt like I was banging my head against the wall and only hurting myself in the process. But I wasn't. What I did was give Sev the impression that friendship is what all those Slytherins think it is, that it's using each other and deceiving each other and being ok with it. Me, who'd prided herself on being so patient and magnanimous with him, like a best friend ought, and what I was doing instead was using this, this pride to believe something of myself that had stopped being true, or maybe had never been from the start. And Remus, you have to believe me, I didn't mean to do it, I'd never, but that's what happened, because..." She blinked the wetness out of her eyes as her mind cast out for proper words and found reasons instead, reasons that made everything feel so much clearer. "Because for that belief and for, for the way we used to be as kids, I'd refused to acknowledge and accept that he'd changed, or, or that maybe I'd been wrong about him all that time, but I'd been acting on it nonetheless even without thought; I wasn't getting through to him and it was hurting me so I was pulling away, but all the while I was also also demanding, always demanding of him without taking anything but my own hurt into consideration, without understanding him and his motivations and choices, and the worst part is that whenever he'd complain I'd insist that nothing was different, that I wasn't doing this, so to him that all looked like..." She shook her head. "I hadn't even realised, hadn't noticed, but now that I do, I– I'm not ok with it either," she admitted, hating herself for crying over this again and ploughing on stubbornly regardless; sod her tears – she'd spilled more than she deserved anyway. "Severus, he's got so many faults, you wouldn't even believe. But I'm no better, either, and I can't try and be friends with him the way that we'd been before, I can't, because I want to be different and what worked before won't work now. And it hurts, you know, it hurts, because he's my _best_ friend, and I miss him, Merlin, I had no idea I'd miss him this much, but I won't do it, because our friendship is worth more than to be put together on shaky foundations of us not even knowing who we are. And so is yours and James' and Sirius' and Peter's. So that's why you need to fix yourself _first_ , because you owe it to your friendship to be sure that you'd put it in danger for the right reasons, and to do that, you need to know you'd be ok with yourself first." Wiping her cheeks, she peered at him. "Do you get what I'm saying? I don't know anything else, Remus, just this."

He stared at her with those hazel-flecked green eyes for so long, and Lily never broke eye contact, even as she found herself breathing cleansing breaths, in and out, because this was all her half-formed thoughts of last Saturday put into words, this was the source of her turmoil, this was what had been behind her plea for time, this was the motivation she needed to make that final step, stop feeling bad about this, and focus fully on resolving the issue. And when Remus finally nodded in understanding, biting his lip as he stared at her, she felt a teary smile spreading over her face.

"So, no more of the mirror, ok?" she said, climbing to her feet and extending her hands to him. "You're stronger than this, because that Remus, in the mirror, he doesn't know the true value of anything in life, but you do. You do, because you have something to weigh it against."

"You're right," he answered, placing his palms in hers and allowing her to pull him up. "You're right, Lily. There's no point to wondering 'what if' about this. I've lived with it for twelve years, and I'll live with it until I die, and I need to put effort into everything else that's broken in my life, not this."

"Right," she confirmed with a vigorous nod of her head, even as she led him out of the room; this time, he didn't turn back. "That's our summer homework, then, Remus. Figuring ourselves out, so that we can figure out our friendships."

And the thought that struck her, as they walked back to the Leaving Feast, was that Severus had been right – voicing things really _did_ make all the difference.


	17. Second Interlude: The Young Politician

**Second Interlude: The Young Politician**

The politics of Magical Britain are by-and-large reactionary. Led by traditionalist Pure-blood families, they have for years been isolationist, resisting change from without as well as within. Rotten or unsuccessful actions often go unnoticed for years, even decades, and like any flower tree that isn't properly pruned in the fall, so do the wizarding politics of Britain rarely, if ever, give new blooms in the spring.

There are some movements, though. The election of Minister Nobby Leach in 1962, for instance, is one such unusual occasion. The first Muggle-born Minister for Magic, he remains to this day the only one elected to wizarding Britain's highest political post. In his six-year term, his attempts of more noticeable changes to the system were often unscrupulously as well as scrupulously blocked by the mostly Pure-blood-led Wizengamot, and he was forced to vacate his seat under shady and never-explained circumstances. What his years in office have remained most known for is the surge of left-wing, modernist outcries.

His successor, Minister Eugenia Jenkins, thus had uncomfortable shoes to fill. Her greatest test to this day are the Squib Rights marches, protests years in planning organised by the Squib Rights groups, that have become famous for the outbreak of violent riots led by extremist Pure-bloods; her actions in the aftermath of these events earned her the respect of the larger wizarding populace and gave her political trust in the early 1970s in the face of Lord Voldemort's declaration of war on Muggle-born inclusionist left-wing political tides. This trust, however, proved to be surface-deep, and by 1975, when she was voted out of office, had all but disappeared.

During her time in office, Lord Voldemort's shady organisation, divisionary goals and underhanded dealings were coming to fuller light, thought they still remain hotly contested. Voldemort himself declared 'war on the derogation of the true wizarding values and the deliberate taint that is being pushed on our society by the insistence of equality of Muggle-borns to the established wizarding populace' in 1970, garnering much political support from the Pure-bloods. Having connections through his closest associates, now believed to be largely composed of his school classmates, allowed him to establish himself as a fringe political player quickly gaining ground on the now-tired moderates having to deal with the turbulent civil rights climate.

In the six years since, however, Lord Voldemort has grown to be considered a violent threat by a great part of Wizarding Britain. There has been an ever-increasing number of vanishings of both wizarding and wizard-related Muggle populace that has exploded into the public consciousness with the now-termed 'November Disappearances' of 1975, which have resulted, firstly, in the first truly large outcry demanding that Voldemort be deemed as a violent threat to the State and his initial declaration of intent designated as a formal declaration of war, and secondly, in the swift turning of the political tide against Minister Jenkins by both the moderates and the more extreme politicians alike.

Since then, while Voldemort himself has remained largely silent as a response, his followers – the self-named Death Eaters – appear to have embraced the newly-established political opinion, with other instances and types of violence becoming more frequent since. Therefore, though this 'war' appears to still be largely played in the political arena, there is indeed a cloud of doom slowly engulfing Wizarding Britain, heralded by the green-lit, empty-eyed skull out of whose mouth a snake slithers – the Dark Mark, which has in recent months started to become a calling card of the Death Eaters, prominently marking those actions that they claim as theirs.

I firmly believe that no peaceful solution can be found to the threat that Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters represent. As a Pure-blood whose family is of high standing, to the point that we are one of the few non-British families included in the infamous Sacred Twenty-Eight list and the only one whose roots trace to the Middle East, I cannot but hold an understanding of the extremist side in this conflict. Our society is slow to change, and slower to accept that we have a need for it; in contrast, the Muggle society is becoming ever faster, waiting for no one and expecting instant action. And traditions are held very highly by each and every one of us: tracing our ancestry back through the ages and invoking the deeds of those that came before us, honouring their actions and fashioning our opinions in light of their choices, these are all the things that we Pure-bloods are not even taught to do, but are raised with them considered axioms of our existence.

Yet at the same time, my family stands out. Not by way of the Weasleys and Prewetts and their like – we do not embrace the foreignness that are all things Muggle, nor the Muggle-borns who are so ignorant of our traditions and values – but in that we understand the other side, as well. We are one of the rare religious wizarding families, still holding to the Greatness of Allah, and for that we are often treated as strange, though many of them celebrate pagan holidays or their Christian variants: the Samhain and Hallowe'en, the Yuletide and Christmas, the Spring festival and Easter. By the Muggle-borns, we are also sometimes seen as strange, for our differing wizarding garb and our acceptance of what they deem are socially-progressive attitudes that in the Muggle world appear to be so incompatible with one's spiritual life. We have been balancing on that edge for years, and will continue to do so until the Shafiq family is extinguished.

But in this cause, I will stand against Lord Voldemort. Not because my father believes we may be more likely to survive by siding with Albus Dumbledore, nor because to remain neutral will by the end seem detestable (though I am certain my father will attempt to hold such an appearance for as long as is feasible; after all, we have business and political allies on both sides of this conflict, and we are the only true traders with the East, which makes us invaluable for everyone). I will not even stand against him because he is a tyrant and tyranny walks hand-in-hand with misery. No; I will stand against Lord Voldemort because no one man can aspire to become God, to be worshipped as one and to crown himself as one, nor to take Death's name for his own. He is but a man, a wizard of great power, but just a wizard even so, and his voice is no more or less valuable than anyone else's. So, though I may share certain of his and his followers and supporters' convictions, in that Muggle-borns are indeed unsuited for our society, I categorically refuse his intent of segregation, subjugation and destruction. Muggle-borns need to be educated, need to be integrated in productive, effective ways. They need to be familiarised with the Magical traditions and expectations, need to be taught the proper respectful behaviours and impolite taboos; they need to be given a chance and equal opportunity to join in our society and share in our history and traditions. And when this happens, I will gladly be the first to stand by their suggestions and ideas for change and improvement, because they will have finally gotten the necessary knowledge to _understand_ the Magical folk, the way that they instinctively understand the Muggle one, for having lived as Muggles for eleven years and more.

Lily Evans is a prime example of such a thing as I speak of – she is eager, certainly, and her mind is sharp and quick enough that she holds the potential for greatness in social justice and civil rights struggle that she appears to aspire to. But she is uneducated in the ways of our politics and society; she is naïve and mostly blind to the underlying currents of thought and deed that make up who we Magicals are on a fundamental level. When our conversation veers into the fine details of politics, she stumbles and seems lost in the murkiness of incomprehension, and nowhere has this been more obvious than in our last conversation at Hogwarts, when she asks whether there are any news on the case against Cain Mulciber for his attack on us.

When I answer her with: "Not much so far, other than the fact that both sides want it expedited. My father's already spoken with Jenkins, he'll get her to put pressure on the department if necessary, keep them from derailing it purposefully as much as she can," her follow-up question of: "Former Minister Jenkins? Did she stay within the Ministry after that fiasco last fall?" shows exactly how uninformed she still remains about the State affairs that, while not exactly fresh, are still current enough to be causing ripples.

Education is the key, though, and I gladly offer her the tools she needs to reach her own conclusions by explaining: "Minchum wants her close. His position as the new Minister for Magic isn't nearly as solid as he wants everyone to think, not with the Pure-blood extremist faction still breathing down his neck. The fact is, Eugenia Jenkins knew how to deal with them; she should have been kept in office in my opinion. Instead we're stuck with a hard-liner like Harold Minchum, who has almost no concept of delicacy. It's exactly what Voldemort wanted, and he got it."

She demonstrates her sharpness almost immediately by asking: "You think the November Disappearances were purposefully done to get her out of the position?" and I do have to say that she is managing to impress me, little by little, though I had been certain that she would not.

And speaking of this event, how appropriate is the word 'fiasco'. Calling them 'the November Disappearances' is far less sensationalist than what I'd expected of our media, though perhaps whoever came up with it had known that it would land all the harder for it, and it really is a matter of horror fiction novels – several small and somewhat isolated mixed communities decimated with no true culprit in sight and no evidence to orient the investigation, either. People literally vanished into thin air, and no one has any clue what's happened to them or where they've ended up, not even Dumbledore himself.

Of course, for those who pay attention, the event didn't come as a shock, not really. It's only the people who choose to pretend that nothing's going on that have been caught unawares.

"I do," I confirm the Gryffindor's question. "People have been going missing for several years now. No one notices the Muggle disappearances, but my father has several acquaintances who've been looking into it quietly, and many of the missing Muggles had some connection to our world, whether through Muggle-born family members or just by living in an area with a high magical populace. The disappearances of Muggle-borns was being handled with surprising delicacy until last November, as well; barely any coverage whatsoever. Then, within less than a month, there's almost three hundred reported missing, and the story was picked up and given a strong no-vote-of-confidence spin shockingly quickly by the media, considering how little the frequency of such things was noted beforehand. This was purposeful and premeditated well, mark my words."

"So, does that mean Voldemort has people in the _Daily Prophet_ , or that the anti-Jenkins faction simply used his move to get rid of her?" Lily asks. The young Gryffindor, for all her faults, does seem capable of deductive reasoning; unfortunately, she lacks the knowledge necessary to reach the correct conclusions. And, of course, political thinking is something one is taught, as much as it requires an innate tendency towards multi-layered thought and an inclination towards correct verbal framing of one's opinions and arguments.

Though Slytherins like to tout that they are the cunning ones, this is quite untrue in my opinion; theirs is a house of ambition, far more than cunning, and possessing of a sly political mind is not limited to Salazar Slytherin's elect. It is for the traits we hold as our defining ones that we are sorted, not for the traits we simply make use of.

"No;" I correct her, "I should think that Voldemort simply understood the political situation well enough to know that a massive but shadowy and thus frightening show of force would be enough to oust her from office. The anti-Jenkins faction within the Ministry was most likely responsible for the _Daily Prophet_ turning against her so decisively. The fact is that she'd made enemies on both sides – the hard-liners disliked what they called her laissez-faire attitude towards Voldemort as a threat, and the liberals hated her for the way she handled the Squib Rights matches and the Pure-blood riots back in '69. For all that she had dealt very competently with the riots, her intervention went a long way towards lessening the impact the Rights marches could have had on our politics. Now that we have Minchum as the Minister, you can expect the war to be coming out of the shadows within the next year or so. It's what the hard-liners want, and at this point, I suspect it's also what Voldemort wants. He's certainly consolidated his army by now and if the November Disappearances mean anything, it's that he's almost ready to deliver on the true meaning of that declaration of war he made five year ago."

"You think the November Disappearances were the opening shots, don't you?" Lily realises, and it's almost fascinating to watch how the knowledge settles into dread on her face. My sisters and I have been taught from infancy not to let our emotions show, and it's truly impossible for me to imagine ever revealing them the way that Lily Evans seems to do regularly.

Clara, as ever, is the more hopeful one of us, and she demonstrates it by explaining: "He does, but I'm not certain of it yet. Amir tends towards defeatist attitudes when it comes to peaceful solutions."

"There can be no peaceful solutions when it comes to Voldemort," I counter. "And the longer we delay the acceptance of reality, the more time we give him to recruit as many unsavoury, maltreated creatures to his side, to say nothing of the conservative Pure-bloods. He should have been dealt with back in the nineteen-sixties when he first came onto the political scene."

Jasper's disagreement is, as ever, derogatory and disbelieving; he, more than any of my friends, embraces his inner cynic, and yet remains strangely positive nonetheless. His comment is a whispered: "We're British; ignoring problems is our MO. Or have you forgotten about Hitler?" in the scratchy, laboured sound that is his voice now, courtesy of Cain Mulciber and his ilk (it makes me wonder how many were needed to subdue us, because by himself, he would never have succeeded, not even with the element of surprise. It is why I know there are others walking free).

"Hitler?" I must ask; I know who the man is, of course, but I cannot say that I know what Jasper means by his words. After all, Britain did lead the Allies against him.

He could probably explain it much better, his interest in history is greater than that of the rest of us; Clara does it in his stead, to spare his larynx: "He means the fact that Muggle Britain seemed incapable of making up their mind as to Hitler as a threat even as late as 1936; Churchill flagellated the government in one of his speeches at the time, because he and his associates had been urging for rearmament in the face of German politics for years by that point."

"In The Locusts Years speech to the House of Commons," Jasper adds. " _They go on in a strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent_. Has a nice ring to it."

Clara smiles indulgently, even as she continued her explanation to me: "Jasper has a point; there was that strange dichotomy in the sixties, between what looked like liberal political leanings on the surface, what with Nobby being elected the first Muggle-born Minister for Magic, and the conservative undertones with the crack-down on magical creatures suspected of forming dangerous groups. "

"They _were_ forming dangerous groups; the werewolf packs from those years are all Voldemort's now," I must remind her.

It doesn't appear to deter her, however, as she continues: "Yes, but that's not my point. What I'm trying to say is that this sort of political climate wouldn't have allowed us to take Voldemort seriously, at least not prior to 1970, and even then, with Jenkins less than two years in office and proving herself with the Pure-blood riots handling, there was simply no way that Dumbledore's warnings about Voldemort as a threat would be heeded. It's only now that people are starting to realise that this is a potentially enormous problem that isn't going away. Minchum doesn't have the full support of the Wizengamot given that half of them are privately supporting Voldemort's agenda, and his proposal about increasing Dementor numbers in Azkaban reeks of further extremist actions, so the moderates won't have it; Ignatius Tuft got ousted quick as you please when he tried to get that idiotic idea of a Dementor breeding program passed, and that was the joint work of left- _and_ right-winged moderates. Don't discount them, Amir."

"They're losing ground, though, Clara. Minchum's election itself shows that radicals are gaining ground, and you know as well as I that radicals prefer noticeable, controversial methods and solutions."

"Does that mean they might use Mulciber's trial as their platform, then?" Lily asks, bringing us back to her original question, and in quite a productive way for our discussion, as well.

"Not only that," I confirm, "but the outcome itself will depend on what ends up best suiting our new Minister and the Wizengamot. He'll most likely be found guilty, given the _Priori Incantatem_ and his confession, but my father and I are expecting the length of his sentence to be anywhere from half a year to twenty; certainly not life imprisonment, as is the usual norm."

"The usual norm?"

"For adult wizards convicted of casting any Unforgivable, the punishment is life imprisonment. It is usually notoriously difficult to prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt, however, and the cases are always made as public as possible, because the public – most of them wizarding elite, but an extremely large number of progressive middle class members as well – have been vehement about that shadow of a doubt; the last time someone was convicted for this was in 1911. As for Mulciber, within a day of his arrest, there was already an amendment to the law being considered that would reduce the sentence in cases of minors and first-time offenders. Should this pass – and it will, I have little doubt of that with the sympathy spin Mulciber's side has been giving the whole affair – he will most likely serve even shorter than anyone else in his position would have."

Lily demonstrates her ignorance by demanding to know: "What does politics have to do with a criminal trial?" and she does appear quite incredulous, which is to me in equal measure pitiful and admirable – pitiful for her disconnect with the true state of affairs, and admirable for her idealistic positive attitude, no matter how detrimental it will be for her in the long run. "I mean, I understand that it'll be politicised and get big coverage in the media, but shouldn't the court be impartial to that?"

Jasper makes a scornful noise and shakes his head sharply. "Not in our world" _,_ he says, imbuing his words with all the disgust he feels on this point, that we all share.

Clara, with her inclination towards the legal practices, is the one most suited to explain, and I keep quiet and let her take over the explanation. "There's no separation between the judicial and the legislative branches of our government whatsoever. The Wizengamot acts as the Wizarding High Court of Britain, but it passes the laws, meaning it acts as the Wizarding Parliament. Even with the weak separation of power that is the norm for Muggle Britain, this would be unacceptable – can you even imagine the House of Lords acting as a lower court, or the courts acting as the UK Parliament? – yet no one seems to care because there is no such thing as a political party that would represent a unified group seeking specifically defined goals. There are groups with interests, but how can you hold accountable a group that's not defined, if they end up influencing, often shadily and without proper admittance and acknowledgment, people who've campaigned and been elected to the Wizengamot? It's judges acting as and for politicians, interpreting laws they make however they see fit, or even inventing completely new ones practically on the spot, for any specific trial, fully under the influence that no one can regulate. A complete travesty. Additionally, the trails themselves are beyond illogical. One can have a barrister, but it's primarily to serve as character witness rather than in actual defence, which falls to the accused themselves; jury trials don't even exist in thought, let alone practice; and the accused doesn't even get to be in the room for the whole duration of the trail but is brought in only to give testimony, meaning that they don't get to hear all the evidence against them. Honestly, I have no words for how utterly messed up the whole thing is, so if Mulciber ends up walking in spite of _everything_ against him, I'd not be surprised," she finishes, and by this time she is practically spitting venom with every word, for which I blame her not at all; she is passionate about our justice system, and to be at the whims of it now and in this way is the last thing she would have ever wanted. Yet it is all we have, and it is more than many others would have had, too, for my father's political influence.

Lily stares at Clara with her mouth hanging open, seeming unconsciously, and it is the first time that I have seen this for a literal occurrence, rather than a metaphorical expression. Her level of shock is proportionate to her illiteracy on this matter, of course, but it is still quite jarring to see the extent of it – not because she doesn't deserve to feel it, but because of the grim thought that a vast number of people have the exact same level of understanding that she does. After a few moments of gave silence, the Gryffindor girl closes her mouth and swallows thickly, blinking to clear her eyes of the remnants of her shock. When she speaks, her voice is hoarse: "How is it that no one's ever done anything about this?"

Clara scoffs at that. "Ah, because living up to a hundred and fifty is the norm for magical folk and there's this ridiculous notion that age means wisdom, instead of senility. Add to that the low population number, the preference for antiquated mentality, and the general scorn for anything even remotely coming from the Muggle world, and the evolution of the country is slowed or even completely stalled. I'm not saying the Muggle world is better than the wizarding world, not in everything, but there is clear benefit to the force that modernisation and dynamic international politics exert on our internal development. Wizarding Britain's been dramatically isolated from both the other Wizarding countries and the Muggle world for years, and this was not helped in the least by both our hesitance to involve ourselves with the European Wizarding War back in the forties and Dumbledore's late-by-all-accounts resolution of that mess. And, of course, very little of Wizarding Britain cared for the Second World War; I believe we cited the Statute of Secrecy as our reason for not responding to Churchill's plea for help. So it is no wonder that no one wishes to work with us, and we are just as happy to remain as we were three hundred years ago. Given this sentiment, I always wonder how we managed to install any modernized plumbing in Hogwarts at all, to speak nothing of the Hogwarts Express!"

"So what can we do?" the Gryffindor demonstrates that forwardness that her house is known for. She does sound almost desperate, too. "There must be _something_!"

I find myself compelled to quell her obvious anxiety, a strange feeling that I indulge for the simple reason that I see no reason not to: "My father is doing what can be done, and what cannot be done through the system, that is what you and the others will be doing here, and we along with our older colleagues in the Order of the Phoenix and the Ministry for Magic will do out there."

The decisiveness in her nod and the fire in her eyes is what convinces me that we have not made the mistake by initiating her. I was unsure about her for a very long time; Clara has liked her from the start, and of course, Alice Ainsworth has been singing her praises, but her connection with Severus Snape did not recommend her to us given what we knew of him through Felix, and from the observations of some of the others, she left an impression of a rash person. Rashness is a trait to be harnessed in appropriate situations, but certainly to be controlled very tightly in all the rest. But Clara persevered in her insistence on this, and the incident by the lake during the exams seems to have caused her enough sting to encourage her to become more thoughtful, at least in the short term.

We shall see; she is young yet, and if war does one thing unfortunately well, it is to mature beyond their years those that it does not kill. I do find myself hoping she is of the former, rather than the latter group, when our Wizarding War truly starts in earnest.

* * *

 **A/N:** This fully concludes Part One of this story, so I want to take this opportunity to thank all the readers, reviewers, followers and those who have favorited my story. Your beyond warm reception and positive words have boosted my confidence in this project and have made me smile more times than I can count. Aside from that, a HUGE thank you to Moon999, who has become my quasi-beta, listening to my endless ramblings on future plans, debating HP canon points and speculating on possible interpretations, giving her suggestions, and always, always being encouraging about my writing as a whole. Your help, enthusiasm and support has been invaluable to me, Lui.

Now, for a bit more background on my approach to Wizarding politics during the time of this story for those who are interested:

Nobby Leach, Eugenia Jenkins, and Harold Minchum are, in fact, pottermore-stated MoMs for the time periods that I'm working with, and as some may have noted, I've kept the sense of danger and fear perhaps lower than what would be expected five years into a conflict. There are multiple reasons for this, not least of which is that to me a full-on ten-year war sounds unsustainable given the fact that Magical Britain can't number more than 50.000 people (that can't even populate a small city), that their political and socio-economic systems appear to be relatively modern, that the degree of fear that obviously existed by the end makes more sense for urban warfare than it does for conventional warfare with battlegrounds and fronts, and that this war _had_ to be hidden from 55 million Muggles living in the UK at the time (if it hadn't been, other Wizarding countries _would_ have intervened, because secrecy is paramount for all wizarding folk, not just the UK ones, and I doubt even Voldemort could have gone against the _whole_ wizarding world without some serious recruitment outside of the UK borders, which takes time and resources). Beyond this, I feel the general populace is rarely aware of the extent of shadowy actions done by certain individual groups, which I feel could have allowed Voldemort to work actively towards his supremacy goals for the first five years with his usual means (intimidation, bribery, infiltration, mind-control) without the general public becoming panicked in 1975 the way that they were in 1981, so I've done my best to establish a logical progression of the First Wizarding War taking all these facts into account. And, let's not forget, Voldemort's single biggest goal was not, in actuality, obtaining supremacy over the country, but immortality through creating and hiding Horcruxes, and given the difference in his treatment of the locket (for which he finished the beyond extensive protections in 1979) and the diary and cup (given to loyal members for safekeeping, could have been at any point after Lucius and Bellatrix had proven themselves, so let's say after 1972 but more likely to be in the later half of the decade since I doubt they could have earned this degree of trust in just a few months, even if they hadn't known what it was that they were guarding), I think he would not have felt in any hurry to actually engage in full-out slaughter that war always is. As is foreshadowed in this interlude and Ch 14, however, that open war will be breaking out soon enough (these sorts of conflicts can escalate with lightning speed, especially when both parties want them to).

I've done the best research I could on the Wizengamot and the British powers system; the only thing I've been able to find is a note under the Wizengamot HP wikia page that says the Wizengamot acts as a parliament in that it has the power to veto or pass laws, which does go a long way towards explaining Fudge's indirect implication during Harry's ridiculous trial that he can easily change laws to suit his own biased purposes, and I think it's not a big jump from there to the idea that, especially during the First Wizarding War, the Wizengamot members could be bribed and frightened by money and threats (the two most famous motivators in the world) into acting corruptly, and probably also removed and replaced if they proved to be more trouble than they were worth, as it suited any sufficiently powerful interest group (such as Voldemort, for instance, or even more generally the Pure-bloods). I have to admit that the separation of power feels far murkier to me in the UK than the US (and no wonder, when the US came into existence under the idea of no branch of government having too much power over the populace), but it is still very clear that there _is_ , in fact, a well-established order that I couldn't even begin to find in any and all information that exists about the governance of Wizarding Britain.


	18. Ch II,15: To Anticipate the Summer

**A/N:** So, after some nine months, welcome back to this developing mammoth of a story. It took me longer than I'd though it would, but at least I'm ready to start posting again, so... better late than never, I suppose. It should be a chapter every two weeks, just like before. And before anything else, just a word or two of adoration for my amazing quasi-beta, Moon999, who keeps putting up with my erratic writing schedule and constant repetition of which scenes remain to be written, with my idiosyncrasies and the little things I do that go on her last nerves. She's one of the most important people in my life, and I can honestly say that my life would be dimmer without her in it.

Since it's been a while, here's a summary of Part One of this story: Lily makes a small change in the order of sentences during a canonical fight with Severus, which leads to her learning about his run-in with Remus in werewolf form. This prompts Lily to confront Dumbledore about his lax punishment of the Marauders, in turn resulting in Dumbledore taking an interest in the fifth-year Slytherin. During their subsequent conversation, Dumbledore convinces Severus that he will have to choose sides in the coming war, and offers to teach him the Patronus Charm in an attempt to win him to the side of Light. Throughout the tutorship, Dumbledore helps Severus deal with some of his emotional difficulties, acting as a mentor/councilor. Meanwhile, Severus' relationship with Lily is still suffering as he's unsure how to treat her now that he is aware of how shaky their relationship is. Things come to a head when his Slytherin group attack four Seventh-years, including the Head Boy, and Dumbledore demands that Severus choose sides. Under pressure, Severus manages to conjure the doe Patronus, and agrees to become Dumbledore's spy. Lily witnesses the aftermath of the vicious attack and, shaken by it, has a massive row with Severus right before the O.W.L. exams. During the exams, the Marauders attack Severus by the lake, and Lily attempts to rescue him; however, James provokes Severus into calling Lily 'Mudblood', and Lily finally breaks off their friendship. During his attempted apology, Severus asks her to speak with Dumbledore, who reveals to her that Severus is working for him, which makes Lily reevaluate the situation. They share an emotional conversation in which Severus claims that Lily taught him (falsely) about friendship, and Lily comes to the devastating conclusion that she treats her friends horribly and that thus one of the cornerstones of her personality is actually false. They agree to rebuild their friendship, but neither is sure what that will mean going forward as Lily is unsure what type of person she is vs. what she wants to be.

Meanwhile, Lily becomes part of a secret club whose members go on to become members of the Order of the Phoenix and vows to improve her relationship with her girlfriends from Gryffindor, and Severus earns favour from the junior Death Eaters in Slytherin and makes some new friends outside that group. Additionally, Lily and Remus become good friends when she reveals to him that she knows of his condition, and under her influence, Remus gradually becomes less comfortable with the Marauders' actions, leading to him strenuously objecting to their attack on Severus during the O.W.L.s. His objections result in a fight that sees Remus ostracised by the rest of the Marauders, especially Sirius, who is starting to exhibit signs of increased stress due to having to return to Grimmauld Place for the summer.

Oh, should probably warn - triggers for heavy drug use by a side character (I'm taking liberties with all the holes we have regarding the teens' parents, and filling in the blanks between information already known).

* * *

 **PART II - GROWTH  
**

 **Chapter 15: To Anticipate the Summer**

"No running in the corridor!" Lily yelled as three pre-teens all but collided with her and knocked her off her feet. One of them shouted a 'sorry' at her, but they seemed to be otherwise a bit deaf, because they barely slowed to a fast walk as they hurried from one train car to the other, talking in painful decibels and cackling to each other.

Letting it go, Lily shook her head to herself and continued on her way to the Prefect's section of the Hogwarts Express in search of Remus, who'd no doubt taken refuge there from the other Marauders. She couldn't really begrudge the kids their excitement, given how ridiculously upbeat she herself was feeling about the coming holidays.

The main talk of the train was the apparent disappearance of their Defence professor, who'd, by all accounts, gone out for one last celebratory drink to Hogsmeade, and had simply never come back. They'd all expected something to happen, of course – the position was jinxed, everyone knew the story, and the evidence seemed to support it whole-heartedly – but this was the first time in which there were no answers to be found, at least not in the personal memories of the students still attending. For her part, Lily hoped the kind but relatively incompetent Professor Chainwaye had gone of his own accord, and had not, in fact, been abducted or killed.

Waving to Amir and Clara's friend Melissa as she passed them – this was their official last day as Head Boy and Girl, lucky them – Lily found Remus in the very last seat in the car. Though he had a book open on his lap, he was staring into the passing scenery, and when she dropped down into the seat next to his, he turned to her and offered a small but genuine smile.

"How was the round?"

"Loud," she said sardonically. "I think the heat's gotten to the youngest."

"Ah, yes, to be young and be energised by it, rather than turned into a melting puddle of lethargy," Remus said dryly, and Lily chortled in surprised laughter at his dry sense of humour, feeling good for having been validated in her belief that there was much more to Remus than his downer exterior.

"I know, right?! I have no clue how they have the energy to run up and down so much! I just want to sit in a tub of freezing water and keep my brain from cooking in my skull."

The summer solstice was around the corner, and it was already swelteringly hot. Lily dreaded to even think about how July and August would be; she loved the summer as much as any other girl who liked wearing dresses, but she was a January baby, a winter child at heart, and the heat would never be her preferred state of affairs.

"So, any plans for the summer?" Remus asked.

"Not too many," she answered. "The girls and me, we've agreed on the weeks for the vacation to Clotilde's cottage – if I can convince my mum to not make a big deal out of it – that's in August. Aside from that... think, mostly. Be friends with Severus again, properly this time. Maybe try to spend more time with Petunia and my dad."

"You think you'll work it out with him?"

"I'll try my hardest, and I know he will, too. It's complicated, that's all."

"May I ask you something, about him?"

Frowning, Lily cocked her head lightly to the side, her half-greasy ponytail tickling her shoulder.

"Of course."

"Do you not mind? His association with those bloodists?"

Ah. That.

Mary had asked her the same thing, the night after their big round of apologies and friendship reaffirmation. Lily had given her the roundabout answer and with it the wrong impression – that Lily didn't believe Mary could understand, when it was only about protecting Severus' mission – and it seemed to her now that this was already shaping up to be a recurring theme.

She had not wanted to start fixing her friendships with people by deliberately lying or obfuscating, but there really was no other choice to be made about this; Severus' allegiance needed to be the best kept secret of Lily's life, and so it would be.

"I do," she told Remus. "But I can't give him an ultimatum about it, Remus."

"Why not?"

For a moment, her eyes tracked the passing trees and fields as her own words and his natural follow-up question prompted a cascade of thoughts. An ultimatum had been on her mind on and off for almost two years, really, to say 'me or them' and let him choose. She'd never gotten around to doing it, though, postponing it for one reason or another, and by the time he'd called her 'Mudblood', it had felt like it was too late for it anyway. She'd gotten very close to it once, back in January after Mulciber's failed attack on Mary, but she'd held the words in; back then, it had felt like Severus deserved more time, or maybe Lily herself deserved it to try and convince him before drawing that line in the sand that couldn't be taken back. Now that she was secure on this point, though, it seemed to her that there had been another reason – had she really felt so little confidence in him, that she'd been afraid of him picking them over her to the point of it stalling her voice?

It was a conundrum, certainly. Her feelings on her friendship with Severus back then felt almost shamefully lukewarm to her now, and yet she'd always made excuse after excuse, given him in the privacy of her own mind another and yet another chance to perhaps change on that point, though deep down she'd not really expected him to. A week ago, it had felt easy to look at these two time periods – before learning of Severus almost getting killed and after – and see the disparity between them, but now it wasn't as clear, and it caused in itch in her mind that demanded she keep turning it over and over until she'd gotten it all sorted out.

Would he've chosen those Slytherins over her, really? In the last week, he'd kept careful distance from her, and Lily had at first thought that this was because she'd asked him for time; it had taken her a few days to figure out there was more behind his behaviour, and she'd for once decided to act accordingly; given the job Professor Dumbledore had entrusted him with, Lily thought it very likely that Severus was being doubly cautious to maintain his cover.

Had he needed to be as cautious before this? She remembered that argument they'd had back in April, or was it May, when she'd forgotten that they'd agreed to brew together and had arranged things with Remus instead. _The Slytherins, Lily! It's about the Slytherins!_ he'd said. _I need things to be easier, too, and you of all people should understand._ She'd thought that she understood, but what if she didn't? What would that have been like for him, to be faced with the ultimatum? He'd made the choice ultimately, hadn't he, and he'd chosen her, but on the surface, he'd still kept both of these connections, and it still pained her every time to see him interacting with one of that group. If _she'd_ been the one to put that choice before him, she'd have wanted it to be public, and obvious. And if he would have made the same choice as now... the realisation she came to quickly was chilling enough that it snapped her out of her thoughts.

Suddenly, the only thing she felt about the whole affair was undiluted relief that she'd not done it.

Remus was still looking expectantly at her, and she realised she'd zoned out quite rudely in the middle of their conversation. Shaking her head, she forced herself to refocus. "Sorry, I... we were talking about the ultimatum." Remus nodded to indicate that his attention was still on the topic. "I almost did it once," Lily told him, "but after what happened two weeks ago, I'm now very glad I didn't."

"That incident by the lake?"

She shook her head. "No, not... I meant, what happened with you and your friends."

Remus' face darkened. "You think he'd not see reason? That he'd choose them?"

"I..." voice stalling, Lily licked her lips as her heart gave a painful thump when the possibility manifested in her mind; yes, some proper consideration about this was due. For now, though, she chose to tell Remus the truth, because it felt like he was the only one of her friends who might understand more than the surface information she had to share about her friendship with Severus, who might even empathise. "No. I mean, yeah, I was... was terrified he'd choose them over me, but that's not what I meant. I meant, if he'd _have_ chosen me over them." When Remus frowned, Lily laid her hand on his wrist lightly. "If he'd chosen me, then he'd have been in the same situation that you're in now, Remus."

As she knew he would, Remus inhaled sharply and paled, and his eyes went a bit glassy. She swallowed with some difficulty, remembering Severus' outrage at her comparing the two boys and their situations, last Saturday. _We may have both turned our back on our friends, but only one of us can end up dead or worse because of it, and it's not him!_ Avery and Mulciber had been the ones who'd done such harm to Clara and her friends, and that had been mostly unprovoked. What sort of revenge would they have exacted on him, had he spurned them publically like she'd wanted him to do?

Thank Merlin things had played out as they had.

"I see," Remus said softly, pulling away from her and turning to the window, and Lily sighed soundlessly, heart twisting at his turmoil and distress. His conviction had seemed so strong two days ago, when they'd walked away from the Mirror of Erised, yet it seemed now that so little of it had remained. Unlike her, Remus seemed to have so little self-confidence that she wished she could just give him half of hers.

She couldn't, but there _was_ something she could do.

"Remus, do you have a telephone at home?" she asked, and that drew him out of his thoughts enough to look at her in surprise.

"We do, though only Ma uses it. Why?"

"Well, I'd like to stay in touch over the summer, and I think it'd be easiest for you during that time of the month if I just rang you up."

"Oh, I..." Remus voiced, a little stunned by the suggestion. "I'd never thought about that."

"We don't, do we?" she noted, shaking her head. "We forget all about the Muggle world when we come here. _I_ forget it so easily. But the telephone is easier than the Floo, and you won't have to write out your letters if you're feeling too exhausted, plus there's always a delay with owl mail."

"All right," he agreed, lips tugging into a tiny smile that she counted as a big win. "We can exchange numbers, and you can phone, but you have to let me explain it to my mum first. She knows witches and wizards don't use telephones."

"No problem," she agreed, jumping to rummage through her backpack until she found her self-inking quill and some parchment to scribble hers on. Cutting the parchment piece in half, she handed the quill to Remus, who neatly enough wrote his own home telephone number on the blank half. "And you call me too, if you want to talk, yeah? I mean it."

"I will," the sandy-haired boy promised, closing his book – Dostoyevsky, of all writers – and stretching until his bones started popping, loudly enough for Lily to hear. Really, how she'd managed to ignore the signs, she had no clue, but it was so very obvious that something wasn't quite right with him – though his face was mostly still that of a teen (barring the scarring he had and the bags under his eyes), Remus' body seemed thin and worn out enough to belong to someone twice his age. Wincing in sympathy, the redhead rose to her feet too. "Lily, thank you, for being there for me."

"You don't have to thank me for that, Remus," she answered before her brain caught up with her, "that's what friends are for."

She almost winced when the words registered, but Remus smiled, so even if she wasn't comfortable with that answer – that was what friends were _supposed_ to be for, but who was she to act as if this was a given for her personally? – she said nothing else.

She may not have always been the epitome of that sentiment, but that was what she was determined to work towards, and in that sense, it wasn't untrue. It was certainly much more than Potter, Black and Pettigrew had done for Remus, in any case.

"I'm gonna make the rounds," he declared, "might as well actually be the prefect I supposedly am. Want to join me?"

"Honestly, not really," she answered with a grimace. "I think I'll go find Mary, Clo and Betts, sit with them a while. I'll see you later?"

They walked part of the way together, but quickly enough Remus got called on to break a fight, and Lily lost him in the commotion. She passed Severus in a compartment, seemingly in some sort of discussion with Zebadiah Thistletwaithe over a book they had open between them, though he caught her eyes immediately over the heads of other Slytherins occupying the remaining seats – all younger than them, with neither Avery nor that pock-marked boy, Philes, in sight – and nodded minutely enough no one who wasn't looking for it would have caught it. Lily answered in kind and moved on, waving and smiling lightly at people who greeted her, or whom she knew in passing, and almost surprising herself with how many times she did it from the prefects' car to the compartment her girlfriends had chosen.

She'd managed to slip a note to Severus during their last Arithmancy class to meet her at the Astronomy Tower in the evening, and she'd been so stupidly nervous about it that she'd gone there half an hour beforehand and chosen to read her suffragette movement book in the light of the setting sun, just to make sure she'd not miss him. He'd shown up five minutes late and slightly out of breath, and had startled her so much she'd found her own tongue completely tied, and had felt an urge to smack her head with the palm of her hand for how silly she'd been feeling, because it was just Severus, for Merlin's sake, not some random, unknown person.

The reason she'd wanted to meet with him was to see about their travel back to Cokeworth – Lily was obligated to ride the Hogwarts train all the way to London, on account of being a prefect, but the train actually stopped at several smaller primarily-wizarding towns along the way for those who lived far enough north that going to London and then back up was too long or complicated a trip. Given that Cokeworth was relatively close to Stoke-on-Trent, about half-way between Manchester and Birmingham, she and Severus had usually just gotten off in that general area, rather than go all the way down to London, if his mother wasn't picking them up by Apparition (which she'd done only the one time anyway).

Lily had discussed the matter with her father last summer, after she'd found out that she'd been made a prefect, but a last-minute university conference he had to attend meant that she'd be taking public transportation back north instead. So she'd thought to ask Severus if he'd go with her, and though he'd apparently just planned to step off near Manchester, he'd agreed easily enough to ride with her back up instead. They'd arranged to meet up on the Muggle side of the Platform 9¾ entrance, and that little nod was to let her know that everything was still according to plan.

Mary, Bettina and Clotilde were playing Exploding Snap when Lily entered the compartment, and offered a general greeting; Lily had had to go patrol the train practically from the start of the trip and thus hadn't seen them since breakfast. Bettina seemed the most excited to go home of the three, but Lily knew they were all looking forward to the summer.

"How was your round?"

Lily groaned, throwing herself in the seat next to Bettina. "Ugh, it's too hot, and these kids keep running! _How_ can they do it in this temperature?!"

"Apparently, we're in for a very warm summer," Mary informed them. "Mum said they were talking about it on the news. We might get a heatwave, at that."

"I guess lots of bathing, then," Clotilde noted with a wide smirk. "Think of all the view!"

"View?"

"At the beach, of course. Betts, you've never been to a Muggle beach, have you?"

The plump witch shook her head in confusion, and Lily's lightbulb came on.

"Oh, _that_ view! She means because Muggle bathing suits are far more revealing, on average, than wizardwear for the beach."

Clotilde wiggled her eyebrows exaggeratedly, and Mary burst into a fit of giggles.

"Oh, Merlin, Clo, you're incorrigible. You better not find yourself a boyfriend while you're at it. I've had enough of Alice's moping for Frank last year."

"Who, me?" Clotilde asked, waving her hand dismissively in the air. "You know I'm a love-'em-and-leave-'em type of girl."

"But don't you want a long-term relationship?" Bettina asked her. "I don't think I'd like a casual fling."

"I wasn't impressed with them," Lily added her two Knuts. "It's just momentary fun, no substance."

"How did I end up being friends with you four commitment types, I'll never know," Clotilde commented with a shake of her head.

"It's because you were too bored by Sally, Neela and Janette," Mary reminded her. "We're far better company, anyway."

"Than those three? That's not all that hard to do," Lily pointed out. "Any time I've heard them talk, they're all about Potter and Black. Every – single – time!"

"Well..." Mary murmured, and Lily almost shot up from her slump to look at her.

"Oh, not you too!" she moaned.

"Hey, no, I'm just pointing out," the brunette defended immediately, more seriously than the redhead would have expected from the lightness of their conversation until now. "They're handsome _and_ rich, and plenty of wizarding girls are mostly about settling down right out of school, being taken care of financially, having children, being good wives. You and I weren't raised that way, but you know most witches have."

"She's right," Bettina agreed quietly. "My mum was like that; it's horrible, all these expectations and norms that are placed on girls, especially in Pure-blood families. After Tin didn't get the Hogwarts letter, most of our mum's friends stopped talking to her, because they felt ashamed for her. It's only because of our dad that she's not taken it so hard, but from what Tin had written to me last, she's still occasionally complaining about him learning from my old books."

Bettina's younger brother Augustine was a Squib, which Lily knew first-hand had hit their family hard, and their mother the hardest. Their family was a bit of a mixed bag, with a Pure-blood mother who'd married wealthily but beneath her station according to Bettina's grandparents, a Half-blood father very successful in business ventures and extremely progressive in thinking, a younger child who was forced to contend with belonging properly to neither world at the tender age of eleven, and an older child who had always been quite sensitive and thus too sheltered before arriving at Hogwarts. Lily knew Bettina's parents only in passing, but Dumbledore allowed Augustine to come to Hogwarts over Christmas holidays, so Lily had gotten to know the boy that one year when she'd stayed there, too, and he'd proven to be exuberant, bright and extremely resilient, quite a stark contrast to his sister. Nevertheless, the love and closeness that existed between the two siblings had made Lily equal parts jealous and sad that she'd most likely lost that sort of relationship with her own sister long ago, if they'd ever really been that way with each other at all.

Sometimes, it was so hard to fight off the resentment that welled up when Petunia lashed out about Lily being a witch, and that winter it had been that much harder for witnessing another pair of siblings between whom the issue of magic appeared to be so non-existent, though Bettina always seemed as lost about Augustine's Muggle schooling as Petunia seemed to be about Lily's magical one.

"That... actually tells a lot about a whole host of things that are wrong with the wizarding world," Lily noted, frowning. "I'd always assumed that it was just hormones going to those girls' heads."

"I'm sure there's that, too," Clotilde agreed. "But it's certainly not _only_ that. Take note that many of the girls considering Sirius Black in that way come from families that politically would not mesh well with his family's stances. But he's a Black; you know they're like the _crème de la crème_ of British wizarding aristocracy."

"I imagine there's also an appeal in him being the only Gryffindor to come out of that family in generations," Bettina agreed. "At least to witches from more Muggle-positive families."

"Strong enough to overcome his personality?" Lily asked with utter incredulity. She personally would not have touched Sirius Black with a ten-foot pole, _especially_ not after his behaviour towards Remus in the last two weeks.

"You'd be surprised," Mary noted dryly. "Now, come on, let's play another few rounds while Lily still has time for us."

They did, ending up almost covered in soot and laughing so maniacally that exactly three prefects came over to check on the commotion. By the end of it, Lily had no clue where she found the strength of conviction to actually go back to her boring job of patrolling, but she did, though she ended up cursing her previously coveted title of a prefect every single step of the way.

She'd not had that much fun with the girls since Alice had gone from Hogwarts.

* * *

Sirius' leg was bouncing of its own accord, and he wasn't much in the mood to mind it, either. He knew he was sweating enough that James and Peter could see, but he didn't really care. The sick, twisted feeling in his chest wound up tighter with every mile that the train ate on its path towards London, and it was all he could do to stop himself from jumping out of his skin.

It was worse this time around than the previous ones; the Summer of Hell, he was already calling it in his mind, and it had not even formally started yet. Narcissa's wedding was a black cloud on the horizon, the storm that Sirius knew was going to dump all its shit on his shoulders, without even the reassuring presence of his uncle Alphard there to shield him from the worst of it.

If only his birthday had been five months earlier, he'd have been out of that hellhole so fast their heads would have spun. As it was, 3rd of November was the date, and this last summer was to be survived, because if Sirius was something, it was stubborn enough to keep going even when everyone wanted him to quit.

But he couldn't stop his heartrate from rising steadily the closer to London he got, nor could he ignore the dread settling like dead weight in the pit of his stomach.

"Padfoot."

Blinking, he turned to look at James, who had apparently spent the last who knew how long staring at Sirius with a frown on his face.

"What?"

"Do you want me to speak with my dad, get you to stay with us?"

As if that would have worked.

"No," Sirius answered, shaking his head and turning back to the window.

"It's your last summer, Padfoot."

"Exactly, James!" he shot back, smacking his hand on the seat. "It's my last summer, and my cousin is getting married, and there is no fucking way Orion's letting me out of that house! So all your old man will end up doing is making everything worse!"

"He can be p–"

"Fucking hell, James! Stop pushing already!"

Exhaling loudly in irritation, James finally shut up, and Sirius turned back to the window, begging James in his head to actually heed him for once and not put his nose where it didn't belong. There was nothing Fleamont Potter could do to get Sirius out of that house this summer, and if there was one person Orion couldn't stand, it was James' father. Things were already volatile enough without the Potters getting into the mix.

He wished this train ride would never end. He also wished it would end as soon as possible, because the expectation was always the worst part; when he was in the house, he was there, trapped and at least then, he knew how things would run, could fall into the routine that was home life. This, the time before, when he was hurtling towards the horror picture show that was his home life, Sirius hated that the most, because he kept getting ideas, unfeasible ideas, ideas that he refused to consider. Ideas such as running away, or, now that he'd learned how to do it, of simply turning into a dog and disappearing into the wilderness until his seventeenth birthday, when they'd not be able to legally touch him.

"Padfoot."

"What, James?!" he exclaimed, beyond frustrated with his best friend. "What?"

Raising his eyebrow, James looked at Peter and waved his head at the door. The pudgy boy blinked, before apparently understanding what was being asked of him and pulling out his wand to... lock the door?

"Turn," James said softly, and Sirius did a double take.

"What?" This time, the question was in confusion, not annoyance.

"You are ready to jump out of your skin. I may not be able to help you with your problems – _because you won't let me_ – but I refuse to watch you act like this, too. So _turn_."

"And what happens when someone busts in? Your darling Miss-Perfect-Saint-Evans?"

"No one's getting through that door quicker than you can turn back," James pointed out. "And just to be on the safe side, I can cover you with my Cloak."

And damn him, it was a good idea, but it only made the temptation that much stronger. There were several stops between Hogsmeade and London, and Sirius wouldn't need for the train to even stop, just slow down a bit.

Exhaling loudly, Sirius gathered all the resolve he had and placed it into one order to himself – _you are going to spend this last summer there, and then you're free and clear_. By the time he'd done it, James had pulled out his Cloak of Invisibility, and, feeling the tension melting at the very thought of the relief that the canine shape would provide to his mind, he slipped into his second skin.

The world dissolved into a mass of yellows and blues and purples, and with the reds and greens went the sharpness of Sirius' problems in Padfoot's mind, too. Suddenly it was much harder to stress about something that wasn't happening right this moment, because he was feeling tired and hungry, and this seemed like a much more important direction for his focus.

Smiling, James dug a sandwich out of his pocket and, unwrapping it, offered it to the transformed Animagus. Padfoot jumped on his friend instead and licked his face sloppily to say his thanks before devouring it with lightning speed while James laughed and wiped the drool off his face.

The nag of dread was there still, of course; it would have taken an act of Merlin himself to make Sirius relax about going home. But where he'd felt an almost uncontrollable urge to just jump out of the window as a human, as a dog, that urge was, to his surprise, not amplified but weakened. What he did instead was curl up on the seat, let James drape the Cloak over his body, and settle in for a nap; he would need all the energy he could get for the time ahead.

Regulus' knock on the door woke him up, and just like James had promised, Sirius was back to his normal self and stuffing the Cloak behind his back when the door finally opened. The smell that had tickled his canine senses became less noticeable, but definitely far more recognisable – the smog of the King's Cross Station. He'd managed to sleep through all of the remaining journey.

"Kreacher will be picking us up," Regulus said, looking straight at Sirius and not acknowledging the other two boys. "Mother wanted us home as soon as possible."

"Of course she did," Sirius muttered as his younger brother disappeared back into the corridor. "Afraid I'd turn tail and disappear on her. Can't be having that."

When he straightened to his full height, he found James standing right in front of him with worry in his hazel eyes.

"If you need _anything_ , Sirius..." James said, squeezing Sirius' shoulder with his palm with enough force that Sirius felt it even when the other boy removed his hand.

"I'll see you in September," Sirius replied, nodding. "Wormtail. Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

"Yeah," Peter replied with a sickly smile. "Good luck."

And without another look at his friends, Sirius tugged his trunk out after him, intending to be the first off the train. As he did so, it came to him that he wasn't as panicked about this as he'd been three hours ago, because now that he knew the transformation could help with managing his anxiety, he felt a bit more confident that he'd make it through.

It was a bit more than two months, anyway. He'd done it four times already. He was going to be fine.

It was going to be the Summer of Hell.

* * *

The Platform 9¾ at King's Cross Station in London was awash with pre-teens and teens saying their goodbyes for the summer and children and parents reuniting with hugs and kisses and even tears all around him. Tugging his worn-out duffel bag out of the train, Peter looked from the train steps around the platform in search of that weathered, familiar face. It was the first indication of what sort of summer he'd be having, whether his mother had managed to drag herself out of their squalid flat to come pick him up.

This summer, it seemed, she hadn't.

Disappointment stung in his gut at the realisation, and he nearly sighed to himself, turning instead to find his three friends for one last look. Near the train entrance was James, the elderly Mr and Mrs Potter hugging him and clapping him on the back; Peter had met them a few times, and they seemed like the indulgent type, which made him dislike them to an extent, because it was something completely out of his grasp. And where James was all smiles and happiness, Sirius was all doom and gloom, as he and his brother waited in sullen silence near the far wall of the platform. As Peter watched, a craggy house elf Apparated next to them; probably their transport home. And as for the last one...

Peter found Remus exchanging goodbyes with Lily Evans, as Mr Lupin waited patiently with Remus' belongings. Suddenly intrigued, the rat Animagus searched the sea of people before him for yet another familiar face, and found the greasy-haired Slytherin loitering almost unnoticeable by the platform entrance. James was still under the impression Lily was shunning Snape, but Peter had heard them discussing taking the train from London to Manchester together when he'd been sneaking around the castle as Wormtail, so he thought it safe to assume the red-haired girl had forgiven that afternoon by the lake.

Shifting in momentary discomfort, Peter discarded the thought. He wasn't very keen on remembering what had happened afterwards that night, how Remus had voiced his displeasure and gotten kicked out of their group for his troubles, or that last transformation, when Remus had done all in his power to break Peter's little rat spine – or perhaps just scare the life out of him, it boiled down to about the same thing. This rift in their group was something he knew he needed to take into consideration, but for now he was almost compulsively letting it lie.

The more pressing matter was the fact that his mother hadn't shown up this time. Lifting his duffel-bag – Feather-Weight Charm was probably one of the smartest inventions ever created – the pudgy boy began his walk out of the Platform 9¾ towards Muggle London. He ended up having to wait only a few minutes for the correct bus, and when he was finally properly seated, he could exhale all of his disappointment and prepare for what he knew he'd find at home.

The bus ride was thirty minutes, and he barely found enough change to pay for it, but it got him home faster than anything else would have. Still, he was really looking forward to learning to Apparate next year; slipping back into the Muggle world ended up only chafing more and more the older Peter got.

He had to walk another ten minutes or so to reach the council housing, and climb up a flight of stairs, and each step he took was heavier than the last. When he was in front of their flat door, he had to dig out his long-forgotten keys from the depths of his jacket pockets to let himself in.

The smell was what always fully brought him back out of the world of magic, and it did so this time as well, perhaps even more effectively considering that this time last year, he'd not been able to turn into a rat and so his sense of smell hadn't been as good. The air was stale, sour with sweat and rotting food and vomit and urine, and he'd have gagged, had he not been expecting it. It meant his summer wasn't going to be a fun one, and he sighed, pinching his nose shut as he kicked the door closed with his heel and hurried through the narrow hallway to the sitting room to open a window.

The darkness of the flat was near-total, and for once he was too annoyed with his mother to be delicate, yanking the curtains aside and flinging the window open. A weak moan of protest let him know that she was, indeed, in the room, and when he turned, Peter found Lauris Pettigrew sprawled out on the ugly, lumpy thing they called a couch with the rubber tubing still loosely encircling her outstretched forearm and the needled syringe lying haphazardly on the dirty, carpeted floor.

That cinched it; it was going to be that kind of summer.

* * *

The Muggle side of the passageway connecting the Platform 9¾ with the rest of King's Cross Station was depressingly mundane, but for the first time in his life, Severus found himself actually enjoying it. He was not particularly looking forward to being home for the summer, but he'd brought Tobias Avoidance to an art form a long time ago, and besides, he was not planning on staying there for the whole two and a half months anyway. He'd had his last meeting with Dumbledore yesterday evening, and the Headmaster had suggested that it would be the smartest course of action for Severus to perfect his Occlumency before the next school year and his true work as Dumbledore's agent within the Death Eater recruitment group started. To this end, the old wizard had invited Severus to stay at Hogwarts for three weeks in August. Severus had accepted with barely a thought in spite of his lingering doubts about the Headmaster, which had now been temporarily put to the back of his mind.

There were more pressing things to think about anyway, like how he and Lily were going to figure out how to be friends again, or whether any of his new acquaintances would be contacting him over the summer. He thought Rosier at least would want to keep in touch, whether through Wilkes or in person, and Severus didn't even want to consider the possibility of owl post anywhere near his father. Michael and his friends, at least, would know to use the Muggle post, and wasn't that a strange thought, that Muggle post was far more acceptable to him than owl post. He certainly had never thought he'd prefer anything Muggle to wizarding in his life, yet here he was.

And speaking of Michael and his friends...

"Don't you live up near Birmingham?" Michael asked, voice so near that Severus nearly jumped in fright at getting caught unawares. Instead, he turned to his new friend with a cutting glare, noting with a part of his mind that Stacie and Ash, in Muggle clothing just like Michael and Severus himself, were only a step behind him, pulling medium-sized Muggle suitcases behind them.

"Manchester, actually."

It wasn't exactly true – Cokeworth was about half-way between the two cities – but Severus would be damned if he associated himself with Brummies.

"Huh; wouldn't have pegged it by the accent," Ash commented, taking the cigarette out of his mouth to shake the ash off.

"Good; I worked hard enough to get rid of it," Severus answered snappily enough that the older boy lifted his hands, palms open, in the air and smiled.

"Waiting for your Gryffindor princess?" Stacie asked him, dark eyes dancing in amusement that Severus had found was quite usual for the girl, and that always made him feel just a tiny bit on edge, because Stacie was in general quite easy-going, but she was in Slytherin for a reason. From what Severus had gathered through their various stories, you did not want to get on her bad side.

"Why do you care what–"

He cut himself off as familiar deep red hair colour caught his eyes, feeling a relieved smile tug on his facial muscles as Lily finally walked through the brick wall and made a beeline for the spot where he and his three new friends were standing relatively obscured from the view of the emerging wizarding populace. She faltered only slightly as it registered that the other teens weren't, in fact, simply accidentally there, but were actually waiting with Severus; by the time she reached the group, Lily was offering a tentative, friendly smile to everyone.

"Hello, I don't... Michael Stone, right?"

"Yes," Michael answered with enough warmth in his voice that Severus frowned at him. "I don't think we've ever actually officially met, though."

"Yes, no, sorry, of course," Lily said in one breath, shaking her head and letting go of the trolley to extend her hand. "Lily Evans."

"Michael Stone," the dark-skinned boy answered, shaking her hand. "And these are my friends, Ash Morgan and Stacie Monroe."

"Lily, nice to meet you all."

Ash pushed his messenger bag back and stuck his cigarette in his mouth in order to free up his hand, and Stacie placed her own purse on her suitcase to do the same while Lily waited politely for them to exchange handshakes. When the round of introductions was completed, Lily looked at Severus with open curiosity on her face, and the greasy-haired boy found himself suddenly quite eager to be away from his new friends and London.

"Are you friends of Severus'?"

Stacie raised an eyebrow at Severus, even as she nodded. "We are; it's a recent acquaintance."

"We studied together," Severus explained. "When's the train leaving?"

"Oh, er, we should have ten or so minutes, I believe," his first friend answered.

"Best not be late, then; I don't fancy having to arrive home after Tobias," he muttered darkly, reaching for his trunk. To his surprise, it was Stacie, rather than Lily, who said something to this very obvious attempt at cutting this meeting short.

"We'll walk you to your platform," she suggested, offering an innocent smile to Severus when he glared at her. "Are you happy with your O.W.L.s?" she engaged Lily in small-talk. "I have to take them next year, but I've spent the past two years listening to Mickey and Ash talking about how hard they are."

"They are, but I think they're more than manageable nonetheless," Lily answered, and they all began walking as a group as the two girls lead the way. "I just wouldn't recommend being a prefect if you're the type of person who needs time to feel comfortable with the material."

"Oh, Stace is quite efficient with learning," Ash assured her, swinging his arm over the Slytherin girl's shoulders and tugging her into a side-hug that she returned with a smile. "I'm the slow-and-thorough type, she and Mickey are the ones with the quick intelligence here."

"Slow and thorough wins the race," Michael threw out.

"I think the expression is 'slow and _steady_ wins the race'," Severus pointed out.

"Same difference, isn't it?" Lily asked with a raised eyebrow, and Michael grinned.

"Well, I prefer the first option, personally," he explained. "Steadiness is all well and nice, but the details are what's most important. Especially in some situations and environments, if you haven't been absolutely thorough, you'll still lose, even if you're steady enough to get to the finish line."

"Like what?" Lily challenged him, and for a brief moment, Severus wondered if Mickey would reveal the primary 'situations and environments' he'd meant, before discarding the thought as absurd – friendly or not, Michael was a Slytherin, and Lily had done nothing yet to earn his trust, beyond perhaps remembering his name, which was something one would expect from one's yearmates anyway.

"Well, any sort of debate qualifies, of course. Politics are a good example of such a field, too; it's why there are so many Slytherins choosing to go after high governmental positions. In general, any area of interest where winning isn't defined by actually completing one's set task, but rather how craftily and well it's been done."

Looking thoughtful, Lily nodded in response.

"Still, though," she answered, "there's not much good in being thorough if you don't finish whatever you're doing, which is what that fable is about anyway."

"I think it's safest if we say that they're both right and move on," Stacie interjected. "And speaking of moving on, I'm assuming this is your train?"

Thank Merlin, it was. Having cast a weight-lightening charm on his trunk this morning, Severus had no problem dealing with his own, while Michael and Ash each grabbed one handle of Lily's and the three boys made quick work of stowing them away while the girls kept watch over the belongings of the grifter group. Once they disembarked, the group of three finally began showing signs of taking their leave.

"It was nice meeting you, Lily," Stacie said as she shouldered her purse.

"You too," Lily answered. "All three of you."

"Have a good summer, both of you, and I will see you come September, Severus," Michael said, nodding in parting. His two friends echoed the sentiment, turning to follow Michael towards the Station exit, with Stacie turning around to wave and throw out after they'd gotten some distance: "And if you're ever down here, let us know so that we can show you around the _real_ London."

Only when they were lost in the crowd did Severus feel his shoulders slump. He wasn't quite certain why this had caused such tension for him, but if he were to take a guess, it would be because Lily had not approved of any of Severus' previous friends, and Mickey's group certainly didn't have a positive reputation (though not a negative one, either; apparently, they were as happy to help others as to fleece them, so it balanced out for them on the whole).

"Everything all right with you?" Lily asked once they'd boarded the train and moved for their own seats.

"Fine," Severus answered with a light shrug. "The old man wants me to stay at Hogwarts for part of the summer."

"Really? Why?" she asked, surprisingly brightly. Severus took a moment to study her, for the first time truly noticing the drastic change in her mood from last week – he'd been watching her as much as he could manage to without being caught by anyone, and she'd definitely still been struggling with what had happened on Saturday. It felt shockingly good to see her smiling again, even if it was only a small upturn of lips rather than the full-blown grin.

"To master Occlumency; he feels it'll be necessary as soon as the schoolyear starts."

"It's getting worse, isn't it," she murmured, pinching her lips worriedly.

"Depends on whom you ask, I imagine," Severus answered darkly, and that effectively brought the topic to a close.

They remained silent for a while, and Severus found himself enjoying it. It had been a long time since they'd simply existed in the same space together, and he'd missed it more than a little, even if it was a bit more strained than it had been before everything. He hated the feeling that they didn't know each other, that they were acting like acquaintances instead of best friends, but he also understood very starkly that this wasn't something they could just ignore, like they'd been ignoring most all of their problems until this spring had brought them to the surface. Lily had been right, they needed time, and for him personally, simply sitting next to her in silence with no conflict brewing behind it was soothing an ache that had been plaguing him for so long he'd almost stopped noticing it.

"When did you start spending time with Michael Stone's group?" Lily asked once they'd left London behind them. Severus made sure that no one was listening in before answering, cursing the stupid Trace in his head for preventing him from casting privacy spells – this was not a discussion he wanted anyone to overhear, and he couldn't help but be cautious even though it was a Muggle train and most of the people he associated with wouldn't be caught dead in one.

"In March; the others were starting to get suspicious about my meetings with Dumbledore, and I needed a cover story. Michael was willing to help out."

"Just like that?"

Severus gave her an incredulous look. "Lily, he's a Slytherin. Of course not just like that."

"Oh." She sounded genuinely disappointed.

"But it's not... he wanted to do it to help me, as well. And I did actually study with them; the cover wouldn't have worked unless the others could actually confirm it as the truth. They're more... genuine, than Avery and the others."

"Genuine how?"

"With each other. Michael and Stacie are Slytherins, and Morgan is a Ravenclaw, and from what I've gathered, they'd known each other before Hogwarts, or just about, same as Mulciber and Avery. But where those two ended up with one stabbing the other in the back, I don't believe that the same would happen with Michael and Morgan. It doesn't feel like they are trying to... to surpass each other, I suppose."

"Why would they want to surpass each other? In what?"

Helplessly, Severus shrugged. "It's how things work in Slytherin," he only said, too wary to delve into a topic that had been one of those where they always seemed to clash without any resolution. "You must have the same thing happening in Gryffindor, as well; proving oneself as the best, attaining uncontested dominance over one's peers."

"Yes, but it's not... it's not sinister," she finally chose her word. "When someone's better than you in something, you acknowledge it honestly, that's the honourable thing."

"Honourable," Severus almost sneered, unable to stop himself as the disgust with the word and the concept behind it bubbled up. "And you also think that honour can keep you warm at night with food in your stomach, too?"

"I think there's no need to behave dishonourably to be comfortable, and it certainly makes me sleep better at night, yes," Lily replied sharply, and Severus narrowed his eyes at the unspoken angered challenge behind her words, the way she'd sounded in the last two years when her hackles had been raised in their arguments.

"You're more fool for it, then," he said just as harshly, falling unconsciously into the old pattern of behaviour too. "Because there is no self-preservation in doing 'the honourable thing', and you'll let everyone else run you over, all for the benefit of a pearly white conscience, never mind that they'll crush your soul in the process."

"There is more to life than self-preservation! If you only ever think of your own self-preservation, your own benefit, your own gain, you may come out on top, but you'll be very, _very_ lonely when you get there, Severus."

"So where's the limit? Where's the line you draw?" he challenged her. "Or are you telling me you have any interest in being a martyr at the altar of naïve ideals?"

"Are _you_ telling me you'd sacrifice your conscience – your soul, because you know full well that a soul can be destroyed with a black conscience just as easily as by life miseries – for a place at the top? Where's _your_ limit, Severus?"

And this was exactly what they always broke over, because her lines in the sand were not even close to his, and Severus didn't know how they could ever bring them together. It was more than enough to bring back everything that had happened in the last couple of weeks, in the last few months, and leave him feeling panicked at how utterly unchanged this conversation felt from all the ones they'd had before. Swallowing, he pulled away, from her and from their debate-cum-argument, and fell into a brooding silence; they'd both agreed that they'd try harder at being friends, that they'd change, and yet, what they were doing? The first true chance they got, they were squandering.

He _had_ to find a way of preventing this, _had to_. This was his last chance, and he couldn't let it go to waste. He was going to need to think about it very carefully when he had the proper time and privacy for it.

Lily sighed and resettled on her seat, too, and after a moment Severus felt a tentative brush of fingers on his wrist. A little stunned, he turned to look at her; she was staring intently at where her fingers rested, and seemed absorbed in putting rhythmic pressure on his pulse point, for some to him incomprehensible reason.

"You're right," she said after a moment of pregnant silence. "It's naïve to think that one should put honour before survival. But I still think you're wrong, too; there is a way to preserve oneself _and_ one's ideals, even when you're the only one in the world who holds onto them."

"I know," he offered his own olive branch with sincerity, not daring to twist his hand and link their fingers together; it would have been too personal, too intimate. "At least, I understand that... that there is more to existence than survival or personal gain." He'd certainly learned his own truth in this, that day a month ago when Dumbledore had put him to that final test. "But I don't think you can stand defiantly against the world, _rigidly_ against the world, and survive. At some point, you'll either have to compromise your ideals, or perish, and Lily, I..."

He couldn't complete his sentence, and fell silent. Lily nodded, as if understanding better than him what he'd meant to say, and with no trepidation or hesitance that kept Severus frozen, always frozen when it came to their personal space and physical contact, she let go of his wrist to firmly squeeze his hand.

"It's like that fable, _The Oak and the Reed_. You bend or you break, and so you think it's smarter to bend than break. But I think that sometimes, some things aren't worth bending, no matter that you may perish if you don't."

 _Why?_ Severus wanted to ask her. _Do you think that dying valiantly, defiantly, is better than appearing to capitulate in order to be able to fight another day?_ But that was the exact difference between her and him, between a Gryffindor and a Slytherin, and he knew her answer already, because she'd said it – in some things, to her, it was better a grave than a slave; Severus didn't believe he'd ever be able to think in that way.

He didn't know how Lily decided to take his silence, but she gave his hand one last squeeze and turned to rummage through her backpack for, apparently, a sandwich.

"So, Michael Stone and his friends are different from Mulciber and Avery?" she asked softly, offering him a sandwich as well; Severus had his own food, of course – practicality before all – but there was unexpected pleasure in accepting something she'd shared so freely with him.

"Yes. They're trustworthy," he answered ultimately, with that same thought that had made him suggest Mickey to Dumbledore, all the way back at the beginning of everything.

"So does that mean you now don't think that of Mulciber and Avery and the others?"

"I..." he paused for a moment to consider the question, and found himself surprised with his own answer. "I think I've always known that my old friends weren't, but it's never seemed like relevant, before."

"But trust is the fundamental part of any genuine relationship!"

"Oh, there was trust," he answered with a cynical smile. "I trusted them to be interested in my inventions, to always look for an angle in any situation, to include me in any group activities – and by that I mean activities related to our Houses' power hierarchy, not anything so insignificant as studying together – and to stay true to their beliefs and upbringing."

"But that's..." Lily looked pale as she stared at him with big green eyes, and Severus wondered at what he'd said wrong, because it was obvious he _had_ said something wrong. "Trust should be about safety," she whispered ultimately, and he froze in confusion. "Trust is... is faith, that the other person won't hurt you, won't disappoint you, won't behave outside of your expectations."

That... sounded so absolutely wrong Severus found his mouth hanging open for a moment. "What?! No! Lily, no. Trust is _not_ faith! Faith is belief without evidence... no, belief _in spite of lack_ of evidence! Trust _requires_ evidence. If trust were faith, you'd not need to earn it from anyone, it would be freely given. Do _you_ give your trust freely?"

She blinked and pulled back a bit, obviously as caught by his words as he'd been by hers. "But... but trust isn't certainty! Otherwise no one would ever be able to break it!"

She was right; Severus knew better than most just how fragile trust truly was. His father had broken Severus' ten years ago, when he'd begun hating him for being his mother's son; his mother had broken Severus' trust, too, by disappointing his expectations in her role of a mother.

He shook his head. "It's not certainty, either," he agreed. "And that's exactly why trust is the opposite of safety – because safety requires absolute certainty or blind faith, and trust is neither of those things."

Lily licked her bottom lip distractedly, then bit it, her eyes glassy and unseeing. Severus' mind wandered onto a forbidden path for a moment, into far more pleasant and at the same time quietly painful direction – what would it feel like, to press his mouth to hers, to feel that lip between his own – before he wrenched it firmly back.

"If... if this is what you think, then what makes Michael trustworthy, when they aren't?" she asked in a dusty, hoarse voice. "What makes trusting _him_ different from trusting things you know _about_ him?"

And Severus drew a blank for a moment, as the question suddenly laid bare the sheer vulnerability that lay behind this feeling he'd had of his new friends, because what did that truly mean, that he consider Michael trustworthy, what did it mean for _Severus_ personally?

"Severus, consider," she urged. "With those boys, what you trusted wasn't _them_ , it was your own ability to know and predict them. You trusted _yourself_. But in this case, you trust _Michael_ , which is a completely different thing, because you're... you said trust isn't certainty, but when you trust yourself, you at least have a very strong basis for it, because you know yourself best – it's subjective, skewered evidence, but it's the strongest evidence you'll ever get about anyone. And you said trust isn't faith, and I agree, I'd not thought it through properly, but when you trust another person, your evidence will never be as strong, and so you go by your gut instinct; you _believe_ that they'd not deceive or betray you, that they'd have your best interests at heart, that they would trust you in the same way. _That's_ what friendship really is, not just knowing how to use and get something from the other person and knowing they'd do the same thing to you."

He'd not thought these to be different things, but the way Lily explained them, Severus found himself hard-pressed to find counter-arguments, because he understood on a fundamental level what she was saying – he'd known, even as he'd argued with her in the last two years over what he saw in his friends, that there were certain things he could never depend on them for, and doing anything selflessly for him was one of those things. It was what Lily had always had trouble understanding, that he'd never needed such conviction from his chosen friends, because he'd always known that it was a fickle thing. People were selfish, whether they were Slytherins or not; the only difference was that Slytherins did not pretend the selfishness didn't exist in them. It had always been far safer to give people a concrete reason to come to his aid, than to hope for such a nebulous thing as emotions to make them decide in his favour.

So what was even the point of this trust that Lily was describing, that she was naming as the difference between the 'true' and 'Slytherin' friendship? It was a risk, an uncertainty that could never be completely assuaged, and Severus had learned long ago to not put himself in a position where this was the only tool at his disposal. Even with Michael, whom Severus was suddenly horrified to realise he _did_ trust beyond his own understanding of the boy, there was still the quid-pro-quo that felt like a comfortable Cushioning Charm at his back, because Michael was gaining something from their arrangement just as much as Severus was – Dumbledore's favour was a powerful tool that Severus had no doubt Michael would use to the fullest if need be. And even on their personal level, hadn't they agreed just last week on an arrangement? That they'd keep their silence and watch Severus' back, if he would be there for them in their time of need?

But Severus also remembered Ash's words, about friendships and their worth. _You have to have people whom you can trust implicitly to be there for you in your worst moments and know they'd never use it against you_. _That's the better kind, if you ask me._ It was exactly the same thing Lily had insisted on, last Saturday and just now, that there was more reward in being able to place one's trust in this dangerous, risky way in another person. But that was also giving power to one equal to himself without any sort of safety net, and even worse, becoming emotionally invested through it, because trust of this kind was an emotional concept, far more than a logical one. What Lily had called Severus' trust in his abilities to understand and anticipate others, that was clean, simple: the laws of probability, Severus' confidence in himself, and a general understanding of outside circumstances. He'd never been disappointed by his former friends in any sort of painful way, not even by Avery's indirect backstabbing during the attack on the seventh-years. He'd been furious, yes, and he'd grown to hate Avery; but disappointment? No, that would have required more than Severus had ever given the other boy.

Lily, though? If this was the case, what did this mean for his friendship with Lily? He'd never given much thought to how it differed from all his other relationships, because his feelings for her precluded any necessity for it – it was different because she was _Lily_ , end of story. He'd never thought about what his trust in Lily was, beyond that earth-shattering understanding that had ultimately prompted his change in allegiance, that she was far from perfect, that she wasn't the girl he'd thought her to be just half a year ago. But now, as he went back over it, he found his answer in that event to the question that had imposed itself with their conversation.

He _did_ trust Lily, in that visceral, personal level that she held as integral to a genuine friendship. He did, otherwise she would never have been able to hurt him the way she had that day. And he'd chosen, afterwards, to hold onto that trust in spite of his doubts, because she'd proven to him that she cared. Whether or not her feelings for him had waned by that point, she'd still cared enough to fight for him, to buy him that little window of opportunity in the form of Dumbledore's offer of tutorship in the Patronus Charm to prove to her that their friendship meant to him as much as it ever had.

No, the reason why they were sat in the train to Manchester right now wasn't his commitment to the side of Dumbledore and Light in this brewing conflict; the reason was that even when she'd pulled away from him emotionally, when she'd thought that she'd stopped caring, Lily had still fought for him and for their connection. It was this act of fighting that was what had truly granted them another chance to do this right, and this was stronger validation of his trust in her than anything else that had ever transpired between them.

But it still didn't prove to him that this sort of trust made for a better friendship, or that the risk was ultimately worth it, because even with that trust there, he and Lily still felt as far apart as they ever did, stumbling around each other and tentatively trying to find ways of repairing something that had been all but forever destroyed not two weeks ago.

Trust certainly hadn't stopped them from hurting one another very seriously so far. But, it did make for a more emotionally valuable connection, because Severus would never, ever have felt as desperate about repairing his friendship with anyone else the way that he'd been about his relationship with Lily. And even had he not been so wholly in love with her, Severus knew he would have fought with just as much desperation and ferocity as he was doing right now, for one fundamental reason – Lily had been, since that day when he'd seen her jump off that swing seven years ago, the one thing that made Severus see the world as worth a damn, see life as more than simple existence. And he doubted this would have been the case, had that trust between them never existed.

"What are you thinking?" the girl currently at the forefront of his thoughts asked, and Severus ran his hand over his face to move the greasy strands of black hair out of the way.

"You're right, there is a difference," he told her. "And I– I trust you, Lily."

The redhead blinked, and to his surprise, her face twisted into a momentary expression of sorrow.

"Do you really?" she asked, and Severus could have sworn he heard insecurity in her voice. "After... after everything?"

Everything? He frowned, wondering briefly at what 'everything' was supposed to be.

"Yes, Lily, I do," he answered her question instead, putting his curiosity over that word aside, because there was something much more important he needed to know. "Do you – trust me?"

She licked her lips and after a moment nodded.

"Yeah. But... I'm sorry, Sev, but not as much as I had before. Not yet."

"But more than at the beginning of the year," he guessed for her, understanding it in a way she perhaps couldn't know he did. He'd failed her trust utterly, had dismissed her complaints about the Slytherins and even insulted her in such a humiliating, horrific way in public, while she'd been trying to protect him from her fellow Gryffindors. That she trusted him at all meant everything to him. And yet, he imagined that it was all quite the same as his own feelings of trust in her, that she'd shaken so badly in March and that had not had an easy time of reaffirming themselves in the months following, with her reciprocal refusal to hear him, with her ease of dismissing her forgotten arrangement with him in favour of spending time with Lupin, with her absolute condemnation of his feelings and his view of the world. With his doubt that she'd forgive him even with Dumbledore explaining about Severus' chosen allegiance. With her own half-spoken admittance that she'd known about his feelings for her, that she'd even used them for her own gains.

Lily didn't trust him as much as she had, once upon a time. But Severus didn't trust her as much as he once had, either, so it was only fair.

"I– it's different, to before," she said. "Everything that happened in the last two weeks, I think it's changed so much between us." She stared for a moment at her fingers, laced tightly together in her lap. "You don't trust me as much as you once did, either," she echoed his thoughts, a little sadly, though when she looked back up, there was determination written over every facial feature. "I want to learn to trust you again; do you?"

"Of course I do, Lily, you know I do."

"Then that's what matters most," she declared, then smiled slightly. "And so far, we're not doing half bad, either. Right?"

Severus returned her smile, even as he settled the topic of trust into a partitioned corner of his mind, where he could easily pull it out later and reanalyse it.

"We've not begun yelling at one another, and it's been an hour or more; yes, so far, I think we're not very bad at all."

* * *

 **A/N:** So, repeating it again - I'd really appreciate a Britpick on this thing, as neither I nor Moon999 are British, or even native speakers, really. We've got the language thing covered, but the Briticisms are something of a hit and miss, I feel - certainly my English is heavily stained by Americanisms that I don't always recognize as being such.

Also, since I can neither embed them nor put their links here, for those who want to know what Mickey, Ash and Stacie look like (remember, they're not my OCs, but rather characters from a British TV show called _Hustle_ ), go to this chapter of my story on AO3 (work number is 5803846), the pics are there.


	19. Ch II,16: To Remember Home

**Chapter 16: To Remember Home**

Tobias Snape wasn't in the slightly run-down house on Spinner's End when Severus finally entered it in the late evening, and for that, the sixteen-year-old wizard found himself relieved. Whether his mother had told Tobias that he'd be coming or not, the sixteen-year-old didn't know, but not having his father in the house gave him enough time to unpack all of his things and put them in their respective hidey-holes before they got accidentally-on-purpose destroyed in some way or other.

"I thought you would be here hours ago," was the first thing Eileen Snape said to him after he'd placed his trunk and backpack on the ground by the door to the upper floor and stepped into the kitchen.

"I went to London," he replied, crossing his arms over his chest and waiting for his mother to properly acknowledge him.

Eileen Snape was in appearance quite an unremarkable woman, really. Medium height, medium build, she had ink black hair that she kept tied in a skull-pulling bun at the back of her head, and the same black eyes that Severus himself did. Beneath it, her skin was pale and there were frown lines on her forehead, which, combined with her mildly aquiline nose, gave her expression an unceasing severity that forever prevented her from being called pretty, let alone beautiful. She was never to be seen out of ankle-length skirts and buttoned-up wrist-covering shirts that were always in dark colours and reminded starkly of wizarding robes while still being Muggle clothing.

And currently she was washing dishes, the Muggle way. The sight rankled at Severus for age-old reasons that made his fingers itch to cast a cleaning charm, but he contained himself. After all, he had no idea when Tobias had left, and to have the man stumble onto a spell in work... no. If there was one thing that wasn't done in this house if there was even the slightest chance of Severus' father witnessing it, it was magic.

"For that Evans girl, I presume," his mother commented, shutting the water and taking a dish rag to wipe her hands on as she turned back to him. Eileen Snape had never liked Lily, which had grown into a silent point of contention between the two of them as Severus grew older and his feelings for Lily morphed from a childish infatuation into a teenage passion.

So it was nigh-on impossible for him to respond with anything other than defensiveness to her probe. "So what? You know perfectly well how school is about inter-house friendships."

His mother sniffed lightly.

"Put your things away before your father comes back," she reminded him with a nod. "I have brewing for you to do for me over the summer."

Severus clenched his jaw and exhaled forcibly through his nose. "I won't be here for the whole summer."

"And why not?"

"I have other obligations in August," he replied.

Eileen studied him for a long, silent moment. Then she let go of the dish rag and turned back to the sink. The piece of cloth, rather than falling to the ground, floated with some speed over to Severus, and he grabbed it out of the air almost automatically. He stepped up to the counter, letting the weariness of home finally fully settle in his bones, and began drying the dishes and stacking them neatly to the side as his mother handed one after another to him.

"To whom are you obliged?" she asked quietly, focused on her task. Severus swallowed past his dry throat.

"Does it matter?"

He didn't know how much true contact his mother had with the wizarding world. Certainly there had never been any issues of the _Daily Prophet_ in the house, because even the one owl post Severus had gotten five years ago – his Hogwarts acceptance letter – had caused such a ruckus in their home that their mother had seen to anything and everything delivered by magical means being rerouted through the Muggle post to them from then on. Severus still had a pale scar on his shoulder, from where he'd struck the wall and the glass-framed painting above their dining table when Tobias had expressed his anger over the letter on his son. Having newspapers with moving pictures in them and words like 'dark wizards' and 'Ministry for Magic' emblazoned on the front was beyond Severus' imagination by comparison.

There was some contact, though, that much Severus knew. Tobias Snape may have been a crafty man, back before alcohol had poked holes in his brain, but he had nothing on his wife, and Eileen was nothing if not attached to her wizarding heritage. Aside from that, their house needed upkeep, and they needed food on the table, too, neither of which would have been possible with the way Tobias' drinking had gone from an occasional shot of whiskey on Friday evenings to a regular near-all-nighter at the local watering hole. Severus' mother had been brewing for profit ever since Severus could remember, and though he knew that most of that money did go into his father's drinking account, enough that buying new rather than used was treated as a funny joke in their house, Eileen did manage to save enough to allow for the purchase of potion ingredients and to keep the household going, especially nowadays, when Tobias was practically incapable of keeping a steady job.

Severus didn't know if the drinking was the cause or the effect of his father's joblessness, and he didn't much care. It changed practically nothing, really, and only served to make Severus' stay in the house less bearable. Back in his earliest childhood, when his father had still been working at the big factory uptown, things had been better in many ways, the biggest of which was the fact that his father hadn't been a regular drunkard, and had barely even been a functioning alcoholic. He'd been rough with both Severus and Eileen, verbally and physically, even then – that had probably started when Severus had first begun exhibiting accidental magic and Eileen had been forced to disclose their heritage to Tobias – but compared to today, that had been milk and honey, and it didn't matter that Severus hadn't seen it that way when he'd been eight or nine and heartbroken over his father's growing displeasure towards him.

One thing was for certain – given the current state of affairs in their family, Severus was more than certain that his father knew little to nothing about where their money was coming from, besides his own odd jobs, but that also meant that Severus himself didn't know just how informed his mother was about the Wizarding Britain's state of affairs, either.

"Things will only be getting worse," she noted with a detached sort of distance in her voice. "Voldemort is no Grindelwald, and Britain is no Europe. You would be wise to keep your distance."

The snort that escaped Severus was mostly unintentional, because there was little truly amusing in his mother's suggestion. Keeping his distance had stopped being a possibility the moment he'd shown his Slytherin friends his capabilities in potioneering and spell invention. Perhaps it had stopped being a possibility the moment he'd seen Lily on that swing.

"I see," Eileen said coldly, nodding her head, and the change in her tone made his head snap towards her.

"See _what_?" Severus asked sharply, putting the plate down a bit more forcefully than was necessary.

"Do not break my dishes, Son," she barked, giving him a searing look before she handed him the final plate, that Severus took in fuming silence. "What do I see? I see a boy being led by his big, hooked nose. I see a foolish, blind boy who's already been pulled in too deeply to escape. I see that my opinion is of no consequence to you, so I see no reason for this conversation to continue."

"Being led by my nose, am I?" he threw her words back at her, setting the plate and the dish rag on the working area because he'd have broken it otherwise. "Do you even care which side is leading me by my big, hooked nose, then, Mother?"

"It doesn't matter to me," Eileen answered, her posture turning rigid, though she didn't pull her hands out of the sudsy water in the sink. "There is no difference between them whatsoever; they will destroy you for their own ends just the same."

Blood began pounding in Severus' temple, and he clenched his hands on the countertop.

"It was _my_ choice!" he spat. "One that I spent months deciding on. _No one_ has led me anywhere, by my nose or otherwise."

"Blind is what you are, Son," his mother said cuttingly. "You are so blind that you do not see any option other than to be involved with the war."

"And what else am I supposed to do?! Cower away in the Muggle world like you've been doing for fifteen years? Espouse pride in my magic to my child while not daring to show my wand in my own home? Spend the rest of my life hiding my magic in the basement of my house and pretending I'm happy for it?"

His mother's slap took him by surprise, making him stumble a step back. Sudsy water immediately drenched the left shoulder and the collar of his shirt as it dripped past his jaw. Eileen's eyes were hard and furious, locked onto Severus' own.

"You will not question my decisions," she said, her voice ice cold, "not so long as you live under this roof without contributing a single Knut. And how you choose to ruin your life, Severus, is no concern of mine. Now go to your room and put away your school supplies, before Tobias gets back."

Furious, humiliated, ( _hurt_ ), Severus spun on his heel and marched out of the kitchen. He yanked his things from where he'd rested them in the hallway with far too much force, and with a sharp tug, his possessions spilled out of his trunk. They were too light from the Featherweight Charm still to cause much noise, though that didn't stop the ink bottles from opening or his scales from falling to pieces.

" _Fucking hell!_ " Severus snarled, so thoroughly fed up with everything that he pulled his wand out of his jacket pocket, not giving the least fuck if his father might open their front door this very moment, and sent all the things sharply back into the trunk with mostly uncontrolled hand motions.

"Do _not_ make a mess of my hallway, boy!" his mother called out, and the words 'fuck your hallway' were on the tip of his tongue.

They burned going down, but Severus swallowed them; swearing at his parents was something he knew better than to do, no matter to which edges of insanity they pushed him. Instead, he chose a subtler way of protest and used magic to send his things up to his room, before stomping his way back into the kitchen and finishing up his mother's cleaning with several overpowered household spells.

As the dishes, cookware and other eating utensils flew to their designated cupboards and shelves, Eileen stared at Severus in disapproving silence, her forehead wrinkled from the force of her frown. She also said nothing about the cleaning spells, or the garbage bag that flew through the back door to their little dumpster in the back yard, and did not in any way attempt to stop the magic being performed, either.

"Have you proven your childish point?" she asked coolly when Severus was done.

"Isn't that my whole purpose in this household, Mother," he sneered back, "to be the object of your scorn and Father's drunken venting over the misery of his own life? To clean and brew potions for you that don't count in the least towards my contributing money into this house? I bet I've inconvenienced you so terribly, by depraving you of free workforce for three weeks out of nine this summer, because that's the only thing I seem to be good to you for!"

"When you understand the difference between taking unnecessary risks and asserting your own individuality, boy, then you will be good to me for more than earning your keep in this house," she replied, and her words gave as powerful a slap as her hand did. Stunned, Severus stared at her in silence with almost absolute disbelief, before making his second exit of the night and this time actually managing to reach his room without further incident.

There, he threw himself on his bed and dug his thumb and finger into the corners of his eyes to block his tear ducts, as he desperately reached for the Occlumency Dumbledore had taught him in the last few weeks to push away the anger into the corner of his mind and regulate his breathing.

Less than an hour, that was how long it had taken his mother to properly remind him why he hated summers. Less than an hour, to make him realise that he'd forgotten just how bad it was, being here. Less than an hour, to make his sternum hurt in ways that it hadn't for years, that he'd half-convinced himself couldn't have been as sharp a sensation as he'd remembered.

Damn Dumbledore and his anger management to seven hells! Damn him for making Severus remember those few precious good memories he had of his mother and father, damn him to eternity for making Severus confuse how things had once been with how things were now, because at least before, he could suffer these spats with his mother and his father's violence and hatred with a numbed heart and angry mind. And Albus fucking Dumbledore had taken that ability away from him so thoroughly that, for the first time in _years_ , Severus found himself on the verge of tears that his home life was horrible.

She'd not even said that she was happy to have him back home.

* * *

There was a time, barely in Peter's memories any longer, when it had not been only him and his mother. When they'd had a home, small but beloved, and his father had been there for them both. It felt almost like a dream, sometimes, when he tried his hardest to remember Edward Pettigrew. There was a face, foggy in his mind, and a figure, tall and large, that had seemed as immovable as a mountain to a three-year-old boy.

Sometimes, Peter thought it was better that he didn't remember any more than that. Sometimes, he thought that his resentment and anger would make him do something unforgiveable if he ever recognised the man in a stranger passing him on the street.

Edward Pettigrew was a coward, who'd abandoned his family without ever looking back, and Peter wished he could say that they were better off without him. The truth was, ever since Peter was four years old, home life had stopped being a joy, and become a chore. The day Peter's father had left him and his mother, Peter had stopped being a child, and become a survivor, because that day, his mother had stopped being a mother, and become an addict.

Old familiarity, tears of frustration and despair began stinging Peter's eyes, and he clenched his teeth against them. He'd learned long ago that crying never helped anything, not really, and as much as the sight of his mother, sprawled on the couch and high off her mind, made him want to curl up in a little ball of pain and hide from the world, Peter didn't. Instead, he fell into the familiar ritual of cleaning up his mother's drug paraphernalia. He picked up the syringe from the floor and carefully laid it on the coffee table, removed the rubber tube and checked his mother's usual injection spots for possible collapsed veins – her elbow insides were relatively intact, considering, which meant she'd only recently started back up on intravenous use – and then puttered about the apartment in search of her other needles and syringes to dump them in ethanol for sterilisation along with the one she'd used today.

He'd have to clean the flat, too, but he was too tired from the trip to do it today. Instead, he slapped her lightly on the cheek until she came back to consciousness enough to peek at him through her eyelashes.

"Petey, y... home."

"Yeah, Ma," Peter answered, containing a sigh. "Come on, let's get you to bed."

"'M sorry. Didn... pick... you up."

What he wanted to say was: 'Can't you be sober for just one sodding day, Ma? One day, so that my homecoming doesn't have to be cleaning you up?'. What he actually said was: "Never mind, Ma. It's not important."

"I'mma... make it up... to ya."

"Sure." She always tried, at least, and Peter had learned to take what he could get, because otherwise the weight of betrayal and disappointment would have crushed him long ago. He just hoped he could get her to make it up to him by toning it down, at least for the duration of the summer.

Holding most of her weight with her arm around his shoulder, Peter managed to stumble his way out of the living room and towards the one bedroom in their current apartment. Lauris was not a large woman – he'd gotten his short stature from her – but she was nearly dead weight, and it was a struggle that left Peter sweaty and feeling even more disgusting than he had only minutes before.

When they reached the bedroom, Lauris spotted her wand, tossed almost haphazardly on the commode by the door. With a burst of energy Peter hadn't expected, she moved towards it, nearly knocking them both down.

"Ma, no."

"Need ta clean up, Petey. Shoulda done it... Let me just–"

"No, Ma, you know you can't use magic around me!" he exclaimed, far too sharply for his own taste, and his heart twisted in his chest when his mother flinched and jerked away from him at the noise.

"Merlin, I always mess everything up, Petey."

And now she was close to tears.

Peter's skin itched, his magic trying to respond to the stress by turning him small and animalistic. He pushed aside the desperate ache of wanting to be _away_ from here, and instead focused on what was always needed of him.

"Come on; we're almost to the bed."

Finally, after a bit more finagling, he had his mother situated, and she was back to near-unconsciousness. Leaving her there, Peter closed the door to the bedroom and, his knees finally giving out, he slid down the door until he was sitting crumpled on the filthy carpet, tears sliding down his cheeks to join the sweat soaking up his shirt.

He'd hoped, damn him; he'd allowed himself to hope, when he'd known better. He was such an idiot, such a colossal idiot, as much of an idiot as Sirius always insisted that he was. He should have known this would happen, shouldn't have given so much weight to Enid's letter...

The thought of his aunt had him jumping to his feet and wiping hastily at his cheeks, because if his mother was relapsing so badly, he should have heard something from Enid. Torn between anger and worry, Peter dug around the flat until he found his mother's purse and thus her wallet. As he'd expected, it was empty of any large bills – it usually was, when she was on a binge – but he did find a bit of coin money, enough to use on the payphone down the street.

There was no answer, though, which only had him even more worried. His aunt worked as a private teacher, and she rarely had any classes after eight in the evening that he knew. Still, he wouldn't have worried, had her absence not been so conspicuous given that she'd known when Hogwarts was letting out.

Scurrying back into the flat, Peter dove back into the mess in search of his mother's stash; the fact that he found it so easily meant that she'd most likely truly forgotten that he was coming back, because she often tried to hide her drug use from him when he was home in spite of the ridiculousness of such a thing. But shame was an excellent fuel for illogical actions, Peter knew that perfectly well, and he'd stopped being surprised by his mother years and years ago.

It looked like she'd be fine for another couple of days at least, if she was at her usual binge dosage and not over it, he decided after assessing the little bag of white powder with a critical eye. She must have just relapsed recently, then; perhaps it was connected to whatever was wrong with Enid. His mother tended to fall back on harder drugs when she couldn't deal with negative emotions, and given the way their lives had been since Peter was four, those emotions were usually in the self-blame spectrum.

Putting it back where he'd found it, Peter instead found a clean shirt among his things and took a hasty shower, feeling just a bit better after washing off the grime and sweat of the day's travel and dealing with his drugged mother. He checked on Lauris one last time, but she seemed quite deeply asleep now, her breathing acceptable given the effect that heroin normally had on it. Then he pocketed all the money he could find in the flat and, making sure to lock the door behind him, hurried to the bus stop, intent on tracking his aunt down.

* * *

Knocking on his door woke Sirius up from his fitful slumber; he knew immediately that it was Regulus – only his brother knocked loudly enough to wake him up yet not so loudly that anyone downstairs would hear, a bit sneakily.

"Siri, get up; we're expected downstairs," Regulus called through the door.

"I'm up, I'm up," Sirius growled back, knowing better than to laze about in bed, even if he felt less than rested. His mother had had a go at his room at some point in the last nine months, which meant he'd had to clean up half of his scorched posters and torn banners, and go through the hassle of fixing what he could and replacing what he couldn't. It was a familiar enough ritual that he'd made sure to stock up on new material to hang up – his latest obsession were Muggle motorbikes, to which he'd been introduced by some of the upper-year Muggle-born Gryffindors. In the months since, he'd read up anything and everything available on them, and had decided that a motorbike was the first thing he was going to get when he got a hold of his inheritance. An older model, that didn't have as much electronics, so that he could figure out a way to charm it to fly. He knew just whom to ask for help in that, too; Remus was–

Sirius threw his sleeping pants forcefully at the window, growling under his breath, and dug into his chest for a clean pair of robes. There were more important things to think about than that bloody traitor anyway.

Sticking his wand in his robe pocket, Sirius slipped into the bathroom he shared with Regulus to wash his crusty eyes and his teeth. Then he bounded down the stairs as loudly as he could, making sure to stomp on every creaky step on each of the stairwells.

"Do stop that racket this instant, boy!" came the hoarse holler from the dining room. "Some of us are trying to have a quiet morning!"

"Don't know what you're doing living with us then, Pops," Sirius retorted to the old wizard as he grabbed a hold of one of the plates on the dining table and hurried to the buffet table by the wall to pile up his breakfast.

"This is my house, you insolent child! I will not be forced from my home by you or anyone!"

"When Mother Dearest hasn't been able to drive you out, I certainly wouldn't even presume to try," Sirius sneered back.

"No wonder I've gone half-deaf with you and that wretch always raising up unholy rackets," Arcturus grumbled under his breath as he peered through his glasses at the _Daily Prophet_ open on the table in front of him, making Sirius snort under his breath.

Grey-haired and goateed, with the sharp Black features and hawkish grey eyes, the _de iure_ Head of the House of Black, Arcturus-bought-Order-of-Merlin-First-Class-Black III, had been a permanent fixture in the 12 Grimmauld Place for going on seventy-six years. In truth, he'd never really been much of a _de facto_ Head in his life. Sirius' great-grandfather and namesake, Sirius Black II, the first son of the illustrious (and last) Slytherin Headmaster of Hogwarts, Phineas Nigellus Black, had been the one who's downright trebled the Black family fortune with some rather shrewd investments on the continent, and had had a _very_ firm hold of his position practically until his death in 1952. By then, the twenty-three-year-old Orion, Sirius II's grandson and Arcturus III's son, had been inducted into the running of the family by his grandfather, and so Arcturus had been effectively cut out of the line of succession even though he'd inherited the title as the eldest male in the main line of the family.

As a matter of fact, Arcturus had done little of anything in his seventy-five years on this planet, as far as Sirius knew. His greatest accomplishment in life had been throwing the family name around and, as the derogatory in-family name suggested, gaining an Order of Merlin commendation for 'services to the Ministry', which everyone knew he'd bought just to be able to say that he wasn't a lame duck. These days, he spent most of his time reading the newspapers so that he could make scathing remarks about the incompetency of the government, ordering the house-elves about, and generally going on his daughter-in-law's nerves. It was the one thing that endeared him just a smidgeon to Sirius, though honestly, to the teen, it would have been neither here nor there if his grandfather were to hurry up and finally die – usually Blacks died young by wizarding standards, so it was right about time for him.

"This new Minister for Magic is a complete buffoon," Arcturus muttered to himself – given his weak hearing, that 'muttering to himself' translated into 'for everyone at the table and probably half of the house to hear' – and Sirius made a long-suffering face at Regulus across from him, who seemed as if trying to suppress a smile of his own. He dug into his food, using his fingers with relish instead of the provided eating utensils. "What is all this nonsense about Lord Voldemort being a threat?! Threat to whom? To those Muggle-loving namby-pambies who want to lick arses of Mudbloods?! What's next, are we to pander to Squibs and werewolves and those disgusting little goblin creatures too?"

"Those disgusting goblin creatures, as you put it, Grandfather, happen to hold all of our money," Regulus butted in.

"Your father's complete failure! I would have removed all of our assets from their shifty, stealing hands a long time ago!"

"And that is why Grandfather knew better than to leave you in charge of this estate," Orion Black said as he entered the dining room, and Sirius felt his spine straighten immediately, even as his hands practically dropped the little sandwich he'd made for himself back onto the plate. From the corner of his eye, he saw Regulus sit up properly as well and try his damned hardest to force his face into an expressionless mask, with little true success. "You would have run us into the ground."

"Is that how you speak with your father, you miserable boy?!" Arcturus exploded, even as Orion's grey eyes fixated, laser-like, on Sirius' hands. The sixteen-year-old barely contained his instinctive urge to hide his greasy fingers under the table.

"In this house, you will conduct yourself as appropriate to a young man of your station, Sirius. I believe I made myself clear on this a long time ago," his father stated in a quiet, imperious tone, completely ignoring the background noise of Acturus' rant. Swallowing with difficulty, Sirius began to nod his head, before stopping himself and forcing words out of his mouth instead.

"Yes, sir."

Orion did not move his gaze away as Sirius reached for the napkin by his plate, wiped his hands, and then began almost mechanically eating his eggs with a fork and a knife. They tasted like ashes in his mouth, but he forced himself to chew them as unnoticeably as possible and swallow.

Only then did Orion turn back towards his own father, who seemed to have started running out of steam. "On this matter, Father, I will speak as I see fit, seeing how I am, in fact, the one who makes the decisions in this family, and you _will not_ question those decisions anywhere but in the privacy of my study."

"Like you ever listen to me in any case," Arcturus replied, not in the least bit cowed the way that Sirius felt. "What respect have you ever shown me, boy? In my own house!"

"What respect you have earned," Orion replied calmly, seating himself at the head of the table. Wilty, one of the female house-elves, instantly Apparated next to him with a full plate that she levitated in front of him, before bowing and scurrying away. "Sirius, Regulus, your lessons will begin this afternoon. You are to be prompt and prepared for them. Cygnus and Druella will be frequent guests in the coming month, and you are to be of assistance to your mother at her discretion if you are not with me."

"Yes, Father," both teens murmured as clockwork, but where Sirius fell silent, Regulus continued speaking in a forcibly calm, slightly worried tone.

"You are well, Father?" he asked.

"I am perfectly healthy," Orion replied. "Your mother exaggerates."

Blinking, Sirius studied his father for the first time since arriving home and found himself thinking that in this case, and no doubt to everyone's eternal surprise, that didn't actually seem to be true. This time last year, Orion had looked fit and not in the least bit weathered, his skin with a healthy tan. Today, though, the forty-seven-year-old Black patriarch appeared pale and somewhat worn down. He'd most definitely lost weight, so that his sharp facial features appeared in even starker relief, and his formerly black hair was now liberally peppered with greys. Like this, he bore an even stronger resemblance to Arcturus, whose face had become craggy from years of frowning and pinching expressions, and whose dark grey hair had turned stringy and brittle. Sirius wasn't looking forward to that in his old age in the least.

Regulus had never been very specific about what had happened to their father, beyond the fact that he'd had a heart attack. Sirius wasn't quite sure what that entailed, whether it could have aged his father in this way, but he had a sneaking suspicion that there was more going on behind it. And he wasn't quite sure how he felt about that, because that reputation that the Blacks had, of dying young, it wasn't something unearned. Arcturus' brother Regulus, after whom their Reggie was named, had died at the age of fifty-three, and Walburga's grandfather Cygnus had managed only a year longer than him. Sirius' favourite uncle Alphard was the same age as Orion, and he was seemingly sick enough that he probably wasn't going to come to the wedding. Even those who did manage to reach old age rarely lived past eighty, which, for the magicals who often survived to the middle of their second century, was quite young. Whatever it was, though, it appeared not to have impacted Orion's personality and behaviour any, and that was perhaps the most important thing Sirius had needed to ascertain on arrival home.

All of Sirius' friends believed his mother to be the worse of his two parents, and on the surface, Sirius couldn't but agree with them, what with her short temper and her love for using Dark spells to exact punishment. However, of the two, he felt far more afraid of his father, because the fact was that he understood the way Walburga Black's brain worked far better than he'd ever understood Orion's. The man was the epitome of unreadable, an expressionless, commanding figure that loomed over the whole family, and over Sirius and Regulus especially.

Walburga was a hothead, a witch who had her way of viewing the world, and anything that bent out of that worldview, she brought back into line by physical force; given that the thing most often standing out was her elder son, it was probably of little surprise to anyone who knew her that she ascribed to the olden ways of punishment. She was loud in voice and gestures, telegraphing her emotions wide and early enough that Sirius knew to prepare himself for whatever was coming. And, ultimately, it was mostly just physical pain, something Sirius had learned to contend with a long, long time ago – in his mind, he didn't have a mother, and Walburga was a usurper of the title who'd gotten it through the most fucking hilarious cosmic joke played on Sirius. Mothers loved their children unconditionally, they protected them and cared for them always, the way that Euphemia Potter did for James. Walburga? Sirius couldn't remember an instance in his life when she had shown any positive emotion towards him – not pride, or joy, or love – and so he'd long ago taught himself how not to care about her and her actions.

By comparison, Orion's main tool for this same purpose were mind games, and against those, Sirius rarely had proper defences. Unlike Walburga, Orion's emotions were carefully concealed, used only with utmost precision and purpose, and where Sirius had long since stopped thinking of Walburga as his mother, he couldn't do the same thing with his other parent, because, pathetic though it sounded, there were still moments when Orion's actions towards him echoed Fleamont Potter's towards James, distantly though it was, depriving him of the one tool he'd successfully used to insulate himself against Walburga. Sirius wasn't stupid, of course; Orion was every bit as cold and supercilious as his wife, so his actions couldn't have been anything but manipulation, and the knowledge that he was powerless against that pull made Sirius' situation at home all the more difficult, especially when he did do something to piss his father off. The only thing he could do was go out of his way to stay below the man's radar, and for the most part, he succeeded in it as well as he did in provoking his mother. Orion was often far too busy with business ventures and political alliances to worry about his sons, considering the job of raising children to be the woman's, and had only begun tutoring both Sirius and Regulus on the finer points of estate holdings, banking and market investment after they'd turned fourteen, the aforementioned lessons they were to attend. Sirius hated those, too – they were at the same time mind-numbingly boring, him being a man of action and not numbers, and some of the tensest times of the day, given that he had his father's practically undivided attention.

There was only one straightforwardly good thing about his drastically differing interactions with his parents, and that was the fact that more often than not, this very discrepancy made his parents disagree about his prospective future position within the family, and those discussions were not only an added bonus in itself, considering they brought friction between the husband and wife, but were also wildly entertaining when he could sneak into an adjacent room and eavesdrop on them.

He managed to almost completely avoid Walburga throughout the morning, but she caught him while he was having a snack in the kitchen in late afternoon after his lesson with Orion, and he almost winced as she rounded on him.

"Where have you been this whole day?" she demanded to know, in her high-pitched, screechy voice. "You are not getting out of these wedding preparations, you wretch; you will pull your weight in this house, or else."

"Yeah, yeah," Sirius muttered, glaring hatefully at the tall, black-haired, pinched-faced woman who'd given birth to him. "As if I could ever forget with you screeching it constantly in my ears."

Her slap across his mouth was as expected as it was weak, because Sirius knew by now how to time it so that he pulled away enough for it to be only a light sting, yet not so close that he'd escaped pain altogether, because that would have just made her angry enough to reach for her wand, and Sirius wasn't in the mood for dealing with Dark magic just now.

"You disrespectful brat! Don't you _dare_ run your mouth off like that in front of our guests."

"Got it," Sirius said in a stiff voice that concealed his hostility. "Only the best behaviour for the public." He wanted to add another zinger, or a snide remark, because this was his first fucking day back and she was already intolerable; he nearly bit through his tongue instead, and offered no more. Though his tone was starting to border on insolent by the end of the sentence, the words were exactly what she wanted to hear; the fact that she took them as such meant she was mostly in a good mood, or at least good _enough_ mood that she wasn't feeling any need to vent on him.

Thank Merlin for small mercies. Sirius hadn't been looking forward to the full-Grimmauld-Place-treatment straight through the door, though there was always tomorrow.

"You are to go to Diagon Alley and get everything off this list, precisely," Walburga ordered, brandishing a piece of parchment into his face. Sirius accepted it with bad grace from her hand and scanned it briefly.

"Eight _hundred_ sets of invitations?! What, are we inviting the _whole Wizarding Britain_ to this shindig?"

He was less prepared for the stinging hex that hit him in the shoulder, and barely managed not to yelp in pain, his free hand flying to rub the spot as he fought to breathe through his suddenly galloping heart rhythm. He could deal with her when he saw her coming, but when she caught him unawares, he always felt like jumping out of his skin.

"I will _not_ have that vile Muggle language spoken in my house!" she exclaimed, and Sirius reviewed his last sentence, wincing when he realised he'd said 'shindig' in his surprise. Damn, that was a beginner's mistake.

"Apologies," he muttered, suddenly more than eager to escape the building, even if it was for a stupid errand for his cousin's wedding that inexplicably had to be organised in _his_ house. "Which elf is going to Apparate me, then? I should get this done immediately."

"Yes, you should," she agreed. "Take Kreacher."

 _Of course_ it'd be that wretch; she knew just how much the two of them detested each other. Kreacher had always been his mother's favourite, as nasty as she was, and Sirius couldn't stand to listen to his grumblings and under-breath beratings and the general vileness of his words and insults.

In this moment, though, even Kreacher was better than Walburga. He _needed_ to get away from her, needed to collect himself before he revealed just how much she'd frightened him with that stinging hex.

"And don't you dare dawdle," Walburga warned. "I'll _know_ if you do."

How wouldn't she know, when Kreacher would no doubt be trailing Sirius at a safe distance. It felt like prison leave, suddenly, and he itched to just transform and run away, as far as he could.

Instead, he gritted his teeth and went in search of the stupid house-elf, to get this stupid errand done for that stupid woman, all in the hopes of having enough peace and privacy tonight to crawl under the bed as Padfoot and try to get at least a bit of uninterrupted sleep.

And wasn't that pathetic, that the only place he could feel even a little bit safe was in his Animagus form, under his own bed, like a fucking four-year-old?

* * *

In extremely short silk pyjamas, leaning against the armrest of the couch with her legs drawn up and her feet tucked between the cushions, Lily sat in the living room of her home, writing her letters on a clipboard in her lap. Her father rested on the adjacent seat with a book in his hand, his unoccupied hand petting absentmindedly over Lily's shin and calf, while her mother sat on a sofa watching the telly, and her sister appeared enthralled by a home decorating magazine. It was a quiet evening, of the kind they'd often had in the past, and it should have inspired contentment.

Instead, Lily was distantly aware of a tension in the room, and, more importantly, in the family unit itself.

It wasn't anything she would have concerned herself with before the events of last month, and thinking it over as she scribbled a somewhat rambling letter to Mary, Lily came to the conclusion that she was probably overthinking it. She and Petunia had been at odds with each other more often than not ever since she'd left for Hogwarts, and it was always a bit of a shock to return into a world where she was almost completely cut off from a way of life that she'd adopted so well.

But perhaps that was an opportunity in itself, she mused. She'd been berating herself over her slow drift away from her Muggle heritage, and this was a very good time to reacquaint herself with the Muggle world – and with a little luck, she could figure out a way of using this to rebuild some sort of relationship with Petunia.

The sound of the weatherman's voice droning from the telly pulled her out of her thoughts, and she turned to watch as the put-together man predicted another week of high temperatures and no rain in sight. His account sparked a thought that made her turn to Petunia.

"I'm going to need new bathing suits, by all accounts," she voiced to the room at large. "And, actually, some new everyday clothes, too, I've outgrown a lot of mine."

"That is a good idea, honey," her mother said, turning away from the screen to look at her with a smile. "Perhaps you and Pet can plan a trip to Stoke-on-Trent for tomorrow or the day after?"

"I have plans," Petunia voiced in a bored tone, not even looking up from her magazine.

"Oh, I'm sure you can reschedule them; Lily's not going to be here for very long. You know all the newest trends, after all, Pet, and you've barely seen each other in a year."

Petunia's eyes flickered to glare at their mother for a moment before returning to her article, and Lily frowned, puzzled and a bit put out by her sister's behaviour. She understood how inconvenient it was to have to change plans in the last moment, especially if they involved someone else, but Petunia didn't need to take it out on their mother, when the woman was just trying to be helpful.

"It's ok, Mum, we can go next week. I'll survive for a few days."

"Well, in any case, dear, I honestly doubt that you'd find anything as nice as all the wizarding robes that you have; you should visit the magical section of Manchester first."

"Excellent; then she doesn't need me," Petunia replied waspishly, very pointedly turning a page and tucking a strand of blond hair back into her perfect bun.

"Come now, Petunia," their father stirred from his book, getting involved in the discussion, "Lily's been gone for months; I'm sure both of you are eager to spend time together."

"It's fine," Lily jumped in as Petunia met their father's gaze with a heated, quietly furious one of her own. A chill passed through her as that quiet tension suddenly ratcheted up a notch or few. "I have plenty of robes already, I need Muggle clothing. And there really is no rush; when Petunia can do it, that will work for me too."

Petunia turned her gaze on Lily, for a moment looking as if she was going to vibrate out of her seat. Instead, she sniffed and rustled the pages of her magazine as she resettled in her sofa chair.

"Perhaps next week," she said noncommittally. In the silence that followed her words, Lily took a moment to study her parents, still feeling the remnants of tension in the air between them. Stephen was already back in his book, and Monica was staring disapprovingly at Petunia, who Lily assumed knew of it and paid no mind. Licking her lips, Lily frowned, starting to quietly rethink her initial conclusion that she was imagining it.

It wasn't just Lily that Petunia was standoffish with, it was everyone. Her sister's nature had always been prickly, even when they were kids; back before Lily had become a target for it, she'd never really noticed, and after their big spat at the King's Cross station before Lily's first year, it had grown to be the only thing that stood out to her anymore. It was a cycle they went through every half-year, of Lily coming home to gradually increasing vailed hostilities that, depending on her own moods and emotions at the time, either progressed into vicious arguments or settled into weary acceptance of the status quo, and then of Lily leaving for school and sporadic letters that served to make her mostly forget what Petunia was like in person, because so long as her sister was willing to answer every single letter Lily wrote to her, it still felt like meaningful contact – and Petunia, for all the ways in which she showed her disapproval of Lily and her life, still answered every time, and with more than the simplest of sentences, too.

But she'd never really compared Petunia's behaviour towards her with Petunia's behaviour towards everyone else. She had no doubt this was because in her own mind, she _was_ apart from everyone else, different in such an insurmountable way. As much as she'd shied away from the thought until now, Lily understood perfectly well that her magic would always be a point of contention between her and Petunia. It was simply something her sister wasn't capable of overcoming, and there wasn't much to be done on the topic, though what little _could_ be done was something Lily had not yet given enough thought to, and she planned to do it post haste. The bigger issue at the moment, though, she felt, was the fact that by not comparing Petunia's actions towards her with those directed towards other Muggles, Lily had also stopped observing them in any meaningful way. Only now that Petunia was glaring at both of their parents and responding in controlled hostility to them did Lily realise just how little she truly understood her sister, on a level that was independent of Lily herself.

Licking her lips, she picked up her pen again and continued the letter, even as her mind remained mostly absorbed with her ruminations on her sister. The emotional rollercoaster she'd gone through in the last month gave Lily new hope that things, perhaps, could be improved between her and Petunia, and, to her surprise, she also rediscovered within herself a very old spark of want for that as well, one she'd thought she'd lost years ago. It was a remnant of her childhood, built out of memories of that bond she'd once shared with her elder sister, but she found herself holding it like candle flame in her chest – the smallest of flames, that she wanted to shield with her palm from the gale of negativity that threatened to blow it out, yet still remembering its burn, also hesitant to bring her hand too close to it.

Because the truth was that this wish had burned her so many times in the last five years, Lily had let go of it as much as she'd thought she'd let go of her former feelings for Severus.

Petunia had first used the term 'freak' to refer to Lily on the first of September, 1971, on the Platform 9¾, and it had seared itself into Lily's mind, until it became the second word she hated most in the whole of English language, after the word 'Mudblood'. In her mind, that was the turning point in the relationship between the two of them, that singular event in which Petunia's resentment for not being magical had boiled over for the first time, scalding Lily's heart in its wake.

The hurt had waned over those initial excitement-filled months at Hogwarts, when she'd thought so little of home, her mind so completely occupied by all things magical, that she'd mostly written off the whole fight as just the stress of that day, perhaps even justified Petunia in her mind to an extent over that damned letter she and Severus had dug up in the older girl's room. When she'd come home for the Christmas holidays that first year, she'd been excited to see her sister, had been yearning to share all her new experiences with her, the way that Tuney had done back when she'd first started school and Lily had had to stay at home.

Remembering the continual little hurts of that first winter still left a bad taste in Lily's mouth, even five years later. It was the winter when she'd learned that her relationship with Petunia had irrevocably changed in some to her ungraspable way, the winter when she'd cried and raged from her own ignorance, not knowing what it was she'd done wrong, beyond being who she was. Really, in hindsight, those were not in any way big things that Petunia had done to demonstrate her intolerance with Lily. Certainly, compared to their fight of last summer, they were little more than throwaway lines said in the heat of temper, with a few sharply directed 'freak' exclamations thrown into the mix. And Lily had been smart enough to figure out by the summer between first and second year that if she wanted to have peace between them, she needed to steer clear of as much mention of magic as she could.

The problem had been – and still was, of course – the fact that her holidays had also slowly grown into the only true times when she could simply exist with Severus without all the baggage of Hogwarts hanging over them unseen, and Petunia despised Severus to the point of incredulity. Severus was the life Lily led for so many months out of the year, and they were to each other that invisible thread that helped bridge the long months when magic was out of their grasp – months that, as the years had passed, had started to feel more and more as if Lily was being deprived of a limb, or a sense.

So how could this unresolvable conflict be resolved to the best outcome possible? It was a different sort of depressing thought to the ones she'd had before her big meltdown the last week of Hogwarts, because no matter the similarities, there was one key factor that was different between Petunia and Severus – Petunia was family, and Severus was a friend. Looking back, Lily could quite clearly see how much she'd lost faith in Petunia over the years, yet to not forgive her was almost incomprehensible, because she was Tuney, Lily's big sister, and that was all the recommendation she needed. It felt patently unfair, that Lily was unable to judge her by the same standard she'd judged Severus for what boiled down to emotionally similar hurts that Petunia had caused her to those that Severus had, and yet she couldn't figure out what it was that made her smart about the unfairness inherent in it – now that she was actually constantly analysing her own emotional difficulties, Lily was starting to realise that it was so very easy to blind oneself to the deepest of motivations, and so very hard to parse them out from all those surface ones that easily presented themselves in any given situation.

There was something else, though, that began as an absent-minded annoyance and swiftly grew into great discomfort in the following week, something that, while not really resolving or explaining the tension that had arisen in their household, did in fact shed light on Petunia's mercurial treatment of Lily during the summer and winter holidays, and Lily was horrified to realise she'd never truly noticed it before, though it was so very grating now.

The morning after their aborted discussion about Lily and Petunia going shopping, the topic of conversation happened to be the big exams, Lily's O.W.L.s and Petunia's A-levels. Given how little Lily had volunteered of the information since arriving home, she'd expected some sort of question on the topic, and had thus prepared herself to answer in relatively vague terms. Her parents knew Severus, of course, and Lily had thought little of their approval or disapproval of the friendship growing up, a thought that had persisted even more as their relationship had become strained; both Stephen and Monica had always been quite kind and tolerant of the strange-looking, long-haired boy in oversized, mismatched clothes, but it had always felt to Lily like her father was the only one of the two who was capable of seeing Severus for the brilliant mind he possessed, and not just the self-conscious, hesitant demeanour he invariably projected when in the Evans home. Even so, trying to explain how the emotional turbulence of those two weeks had quite possibly let do Lily mucking up at least one of her O.W.L.s was not something she was eager to share with them.

"They went fine," she answered her father's question, shrugging with one shoulder as she put some egg into her mouth. "I'll know in August, so I can decide on what N.E.W.T.s I want to take."

That wasn't true, actually – they were expecting their results in the beginning of July. But a little white lie wasn't going to harm anyone, and it'd give her time to digest the disappointment before dealing with outsider reactions.

"Oh, darling, I don't doubt you'll get Outstandings on all of them," her mother said, patting her shoulder as she walked past the table towards the sink. "You are brilliant, after all; quite the brightest witch of your generation, your Head of House assures me constantly."

"My... You've spoken to Professor McGonagall about me?" Lily asked, nonplussed.

"Why, of course. She is always most kind to answer my inquiries, I do believe we've become great friends. She's told me how hard you must have worked for the O.W.L.s; they sound far more demanding than the regular exams that Pet took."

"I–"

"Yes," Petunia cut in, voice filled with disgust. "If it's _magic,_ why, it _must_ be harder than what I've taken!"

"Oh, don't get all snippy, dear," Monica admonished lightly. "No one is denying that you've worked hard for your O and A-levels. But there's little need for innate talent in most of the things taught in our schools, whereas at Hogwarts–"

"Actually," Lily cut in, feeling a cold, itchy tingling down her spine at where this was seemingly going, "most of the magic requires nothing more than memorisation. It's really not all that impressive."

Petunia gave her a strange look, almost surprised, and yet with a strong note of exasperation, while her mother waved a hand in the air in dismissal.

"Oh, no, Minerva's explained quite a bit to me about it, the various types of magic and such. She told me you have a marked aptitude for charms, though I have to admit I'm a bit unclear about what exactly those are."

"Perhaps you could have her show you some?" Petunia interjected. "Oh, I've forgotten; she's not allowed."

"Really, Mum, I'm sure it's not any harder than the O-levels. And, actually, I'm not sure I'll get that many Outstandings."

"Nonsense; what else would you get?"

"Anything else on the spectrum?" Petunia muttered into her magazine, low enough that their mother didn't seem to hear, though Lily, who was sitting close to her, had no such issue.

"I'm sure that whatever you get will be good enough to get you into any advanced classes of your choice," her father piped up with his usual Lily-smile, they one he always directed at her when she talked his ear off about whichever academic topic happened to catch her fancy.

"You cannot be doubting her, Stephen!"

"I have never doubted her, as you well know," he said calmly. "I am simply saying that I have no expectations that she will ever manage to fail."

"Oh? Is that all?"

"Of course it is. She needs nothing else. Do you, Lilyflower?"

"Er... I'm... fine?"

It was the only thing she could think to say, because the truth was, Lily felt utterly wrong-footed as she stared between her parents until they both nodded, said variations on 'yes, quite fine', and turned back to their previous tasks as the whole thing had not even happened. Biting her lip, she turned to look at Petunia, who seemed to be making a very sharp point of pretending that nothing was going on.

She excused herself from the table as quickly as she could, chased out of the room by the sense of oily discomfort that the conversation had left on her. She tried to dismiss it as a one-time thing, without any success, because as the days continued, the situations kept repeating themselves over and over – the conversation drifting to Lily's schooling or anything else related to magic in general, Petunia responding more or less overtly negatively to it, followed by their mother making some offhand remark that served to incense the situation rather than pacify it, and if their father happened to be there, either of the two would pull him into their passive-aggressive confrontation and the tension would immediately shift from Petunia to Stephen, until it was not so much resolved as simply allowed to disperse, leaving nasty aftertastes in Lily's mind.

It took her a week to finally grasp what, _exactly_ , was so upsetting about it, and then she felt suddenly such disgust for the whole situation that it felt like she was being given whiplash – her mother was not only _constantly_ finding ways of insinuating the topic of magic into everyday life at their home (and, for the first time in her life, it was wearing on Lily more than a bit, because right now, the very _last_ thing she wanted was to think about Hogwarts and the exams and the house rivalry and the bloody conflict), but was doing so in such a way that she was also incidentally putting down practically everything Muggle – and thus important in Petunia's life – in the process, because the focus of her conversations always ended up something teenaged-appropriate, and thus included both Lily and Petunia in it. It was never _negative_ , what she said about Petunia's life, her school and grades, her friends, her interests, her clothes, her natural abilities. In fact, she said plenty of positive things about it, and on its own, it sounded exactly as a proud mother was supposed to sound about her eldest child. She was simply using it as a reference to highlight how highly she thought of Lily's life, thereby finding it less praise-worthy, and apparently not even realising that this was causing such tension in Petunia and Lily's relationship that the two sister were barely communicating at all. And the worst part of it was that Monica truly seemed oblivious to what she was doing, at least on a conscious level.

How much of this was happening while Lily was at Hogwarts? How much did Petunia's bitterness get fed by it? And why was their father acting as if it wasn't happening most of the time? And now that she was seeing this, other memories were surfacing, too – Petunia, in the heat of the moment, during their more vicious fights, accusing Lily of hogging attention, claiming that her parents were playing favourites between them, insisting that Lily's very existence was a slight against Petunia.

It wasn't fair, none of it, not Petunia's bigoted judgment of Lily for something Lily couldn't help, not their parents' casual unawareness of what was bad parenting that was coming between the two sisters, not even Lily's own blindness in this whole situation, or her refusal to get to the root of her issue with Petunia, born out of emotional hurt and an even deeper fear of rejection. But feeling resentful for the unfairness of it all hadn't done anything for her thus far, just like it hadn't done anything for her when it came to her differences with Severus. Only hashing out all of these had led them to any sort of movement on that front.

It was then that she decided enough was enough – if there was to be _any_ peace in this house, and in her own mind and heart, then she needed to use this summer to finally settle things with Petunia, one way or another. Even if it meant losing her sister forever.

* * *

 **A/N:** Firstly, I have no experience with drug or alcohol addiction whatsoever, either direct or indirect, so if something blatantly stands out, let me know, since I want it to be as realistic as possible. Ditto for domestic abuse and violence against children - I've done my research, but it's still something that I've only read and watched about, rather than experienced, and my intent is not to be disrespectful to either of these very difficult and heavy topics.

I'm referencing to HP wikia for most of the background info on the characters, including their home lives (though anything not strictly canon is subject to change if it doesn't suit me). Most of the parents' names are known, so I just used them: James (Fleamont and Euphemia), Sirius and Regulus (Orion and Walburga), Remus (Lyall and Hope), and Severus (Tobias and Eileen). Enid Pettigrew is an early concept character of some sort that's only mentioned on HP wikia, so I reappropriated the name to my own purposes. We know nothing about Lily's home life, which is from what I can tell a usual JKR thing given she's the only relevant Muggle-born of the era (Hermione also has the dubious honor of being the only main character of the canon era whose parents apparently didn't deserve proper names), so that part is my invention. Lily is the main focus of Part II, therefore her home life will be the most explored. Others will get their share of the spotlight, either in Part II or in the future of the story, but if there's some specific event you want to know about, drop me a line and I'll see about writing a side one-shot if I'm not planning to use it in the main story already.

Sirius has by far the largest and most complex family tree of all characters, and I decided to keep to it, including most of the dates given (not all, though; Bellatrix's father according to Word-of-God had her at the age of 13, which is just JKR not knowing her basic math, or not caring, so that's been scrapped, because frankly I refuse to deal with child marriages and teen pregnancies on top of all other things Black). The line of inheritance goes like this: Phineas Nigellus (of DH fame, DOB 1847) - Sirius Black II (DOB 1877) - Arcturus Black (DOB 1901) - Orion Black (DOB 1929) - Sirius Black III (our Sirius, DOB 1959). Arcturus died by WoG in 1991, and given his place in the main line of the family, I thought it would be quite logical that he'd be living at Grimmauld Place. We don't know anything about his wife beyond her name (Melania Macmillan), but in my story she died in Orion and Lucretia's youth (Lucretia being Orion's older sister and Sirius' aunt). Blacks also seem to die alarmingly young, given that apparently most wizards easily reach 115 years of age without slowing down (Dumbledore certainly did and no one thought it strange), and that obviously will play a big role in the story as things unfold.


	20. Ch II,17: To Struggle for Clarity

**Chapter 17: To Struggle for Clarity**

"Remus, why is one of your classmates calling on the telephone?!" Hope Lupin's voice called distantly from the other end of the cottage, and Remus blinked in surprise, putting his book down.

"Who's calling?!" he yelled back, nonplussed.

"A Lily Evans!"

Scrambling off his bed at the speed of light, Remus almost stumbled his way through the house to the kitchen, where the phone had been hung on the wall last year. His mother, slender and with an old-world beauty to her face that stopped her from appearing in any way older than her forty years even though her sandy hair was liberally streaked with silver, looked at him in open curiosity even as she handed him the handset, and Remus grimaced slightly.

He'd _completely_ forgotten to tell his mother about exchanging phone numbers with Lily in the wake of arriving home, and now he was berating himself for it, because part of the reason he'd forgotten had been because he'd not actually thought that Lily _would_ call.

"Lily, hi," he said, pressing the handset to his ear tightly and finding that his heart was fluttering in his chest more than from simply running through the house.

" _Hi, Remus! Did I call at a bad time?_ "

"No, no, I just... I'd, er, forgotten to tell my mum about you calling. It's not important," he answered her, shaking his head at his mother's amused look at the same time.

" _Oh, good. How are you? How's your summer been going so far?_ "

"Fine. I'm... fine. Everything's... fine."

Turning his back on his mother, he banged his forehead lightly against the wall by the phone, wondering where his brains had gone and why his tongue was running unchecked. Seriously, _fine_? Was that the only word he could think of to describe the last week?

Unfortunately, given his mother's relative proximity in their tiny kitchen, it really was. In truth, things were anything but.

Exhausted by everything that had happened in the weeks preceding his arrival home, Remus had found himself in bed far more than out of it, feeling lethargic and sleepy until he'd found little point in getting up when he could read just as easily in bed. The added sleep had actually done him good in finally shaking off the residual aches and pains of the last transformation, if not in making him any less tired, and his appetite was still far from where his mother wished it to be, worried as she was given the rather more violent traces of the full moon than was usual.

His father had picked him up at the King's Cross, and had Apparated them with little fanfare to Wales, and though he'd pretended that everything was fine, Remus had noticed the way he'd almost flinched at the sight of Remus' healing wounds and new scars. The resulting scarcity of Lyall Lupin had been expected, but it had hurt Remus nonetheless. After all, he'd not seen his father since this time last year, and the man was undoubtedly doing his damnedest to avoid Remus as much as he could.

Remus' relationship with his father had always been tense, as far back as he could remember. Lyall was a good husband, and Remus' parents both loved each other and loved him unconditionally, but since Remus' earliest childhood – since his turning, really, but he had almost no memories of before then, so he chose not to notice this fact – there had been distance between them that Remus had not known how to breach, for the simple reason that he couldn't understand _why_ it was there in the first place.

Perhaps he would have noticed it less if he'd not been as close to his mother growing up as he was. Hope, in spite of being a Muggle, had taken to the wizarding life like a duck to water when she'd met and married Lyall, and where her husband had pulled into himself after Remus had been turned, Hope had stepped up to fill the hole. Remus had no doubt that other kids would have found her actions annoying, would have thought her an overbearing parent, but he didn't. They'd been almost nomadic in his youth, before Hogwarts, having to move every few months as the neighbours became suspicious of the monthly noises, forcing Hope to give up her job and friends, just as much as Remus had been forced to remain a secluded shut-in. As a consequence, they'd grown from a simple parent and child to friends as well as Remus had grown up, and though it was different to an extent now, with Remus away at school for most of the year, Hope working properly again and both of them being much older, the bond between the mother and son had remained as strong as ever.

Which was primarily why he didn't want to let his mother know how depressed he was feeling about having his father acting in many of the same ways that Remus' former friends had been, after their big fight. He wanted to share all this with Lily – she was the only person he felt he _could_ share it with in the first place – but he could hardly do so while standing in the same room as Hope. So, instead, he stuck to his 'fine' while Lily grilled him over it until she finally gave up.

" _Anything from the guys?_ "

"Ah, no," he answered, aiming for nonchalant but failing miserably and achieving somewhere between pathetic and desperate. "Not that I was expecting it."

" _God, what wankers,_ " Lily muttered, and Remus had a stray thought that her expletive apparently shifted depending on her surroundings – she very rarely used 'God' at Hogwarts, having assimilated 'Merlin' with excellent expertise for a Muggle-born, yet that was all she'd used in this conversation. " _If it makes you feel any better, my week hasn't been peachy, either_."

"Oh? Does it have to do with Snape?"

" _Surprisingly, no. Actually, I've not seen him since we came home. No, it's my mother. And Petunia. Well, and my father, too. Oh, I don't know, Remus. I feel like I've fallen through some sort of portal into a world where no one gets along properly in my house anymore, and I can't make heads nor tails of it._ "

"I'm sure you'll figure it out," Remus offered loyally.

" _I'm going to have to, if I want things to go back to the way they were last year. If they even were different last year._ "

"Don't you remember?"

" _That's the problem, Remus; I don't know if I'm remembering it right. I mean, I thought that everything was fine, but obviously now it's not, and after everything that's happened last month at Hogwarts, I'm starting to think that I've been blind to all the other stuff that was going wrong all around me, just like I was when it came to Severus._ "

"Maybe, but even if you were, you're not blind to it anymore," he pointed out, trying to be as pragmatic as he could. Given all the emotional upheavals in her life recently, he thought that maybe what she needed was an action plan to tackle the issues. After all, she'd herself said that she wanted to face them, not hide from them anymore. "That's a good place to start."

" _You're right. Thanks, I think I needed a bit of support on this._ "

"Any time."

" _Does that mean you'll actually phone me, or should I be the one to keep track of the schedule?_ " she asked, voice lilting in amusement.

"I'll phone you," he answered, suddenly itching to get off the line, uncomfortably aware that his mother was basically listening in on his side of the conversation. He couldn't add 'when I can properly talk', but he thought that Lily understood the implication behind his promise nonetheless.

" _All right; if you don't catch me at home, just ring back later in the day, but I think I'll probably be hiding indoors until the stupid heatwave breaks. If I can't go swimming, it's not worth it to go outside at all, I swear._ "

"Sure. I'll talk to you later, then."

" _Bye, Remus!_ "

They rang off, and when Remus replaced the handset and turned around, his mother was giving him a suspiciously knowing look.

"So, Lily, huh?"

He frowned, trying to parse out what she meant, and when it hit him, he felt his cheeks warming stupidly fast.

"Mum! No! No, no, you've got it all wrong. Lily's just a new friend, is all."

"Oh?"

Sighing, Remus dropped himself into the chair to rest his elbows on the tabletop and run his fingers distractedly through his hair.

"I haven't seen any owl post recently," Hope commented. "I'd have thought at least James would have written, he's usually quite punctual about your correspondence."

"Ma..." Remus sighed, finally turning up his eyes to meet hers. He had no idea what she saw on his face, but her teasing smile vanished almost immediately, to be replaced with a worried frown. Putting aside what she'd been doing, Hope moved to sit next to him.

" _Cariad_? What is it?"

"We... had a fight," he whispered, stumbling over his words, haunted by the memory of that night as he squeezed his eyes tightly shut. "I'm not their friend anymore."

"Remus," his mother breathed out, and her warm fingers encircled his wrists. "What _happened_?"

The story came spilling out – not everything, not the worst of the bullying, not... he couldn't tell her, couldn't even stand the idea of her looking at him with disappointment in her eyes, so he modified it, said it was the usual pranking that slipped control, and even with that concession, he felt so ashamed of that day, of standing by and letting his friends act in that way, turning a blind eye to it, remembering Lily's berating words and judging eyes over it.

"They didn't even come to the hospital wing to visit, after..."

He hated the tears that were stinging his eyes _again_ , as if he'd not cried enough over this _stupid_ little detail, and it felt good to burrow into his mother's arms as if he was ten years old again and not sixteen, to take in her warmth and love and just breathe. He'd missed her so much in the last month, her presence and support and courage.

She prodded him to his feet and shifted them onto the couch in the sitting room, where she could properly lift her legs up and he could snuggle into her side and try to pretend that the world couldn't get him, that the bad things that existed out there weren't also inside of him, there to stay until the day he died.

"Tell me about Lily, then," his mother instructed, and that was a comfortable topic, a _soothing_ topic, because the phone conversation had left a warm glow in his chest, that Lily had _remembered_ him, had wanted to tell him her issues and hear his advice, had wanted to know what was going on with him enough that she'd asked him three times if he was sure he was fine.

"She's the girl I told you was top of our class in Charms. We study together a lot, and she's had some trouble with her best friend this semester too, so we, er, we talk about, uh..." He swallowed, giving up on that specific tangent and opening his mouth to describe how they'd become friends, but then it came to him that he _couldn't tell her_ , because they'd become friends over Sirius almost using Remus to kill or maim or infect Snape, and he suddenly wanted to tear his hair out.

He had always told his mother pretty much everything; he'd never truly learned to shy away from telling her things that happened in his life, having never had friends before Hogwarts to teach him such thinking, and there had been practically nothing that he felt embarrassed saying until this year, mainly because his infrequent crushes on fellow classmates were always allowed to pass unremarked, and he'd read more than enough on the topic of sex to not need any advice from his parents anyway.

Yet in the space of half an hour, he'd lied to his mother once, in a big way, and now he was going to keep a secret from her too, just as large, and he felt sick to his stomach, a tiny, vindictive part of his mind whispering that this was other three Gryffindors' fault in the first place, because all of the topics he was agonising over were in one way or another tied to their indiscretions.

That vindictive part of him made him hate his former friends with a viciousness that terrified him, that smelled of damp fur and crazed instinct, that brought with it flashes of maddened rage and fear that accompanied a frenzied need to hunt, to hurt, to bleed the little rat and the late-arriving deer and most of all the betraying dog.

He pushed it away with as much mental force as he could; the wolf was _not_ allowed to take over his emotions and conscious mind, not ever. There was nothing that Remus could do when it came to the subconscious mind during the full moon, but not in the middle of the month, when he had full control over himself. And _definitely_ not when he was cuddling with his mother.

"Remmy, what's been going on in the last few months?" his mother asked him worriedly, sitting up, her body language signalling that she was very serious. "You've been withdrawn more than usual in your letters ever since Christmas, and now you're here, and you've barely gotten out of bed or eaten properly since coming home, and apparently your friends have abandoned you, and this new friend of yours, this girl, you won't even tell me anything substantial about her. Does this have anything to do with the Curse?"

Remus shook his head, clenching his eyes shut and burying his face in his mother's midriff.

"It's complicated, Ma, and I just... Some things I can't tell you, and the rest won't make much sense without that, and... please, let it go? Please."

She sighed, her worry echoing in that exhalation, but didn't push, and his heart hurt with how much he loved her for it.

"What _can_ you tell me, then?"

"Lily's the one who made me realise what my friends had done," he explained to her quietly. "She didn't turn her back on me, even though she'd gotten hurt by our actions. She comes to visit me in the hospital wing every month."

"She _knows_?"

"Er... yeah. She figured it out." He almost told her Snape knew, too, but held his tongue instead; _another_ thing he couldn't say. "Dumbledore talked to her, and she'd not betray me. She's my friend. I suppose..." he swallowed, wiping his cheeks with his sleeve, "she's special."

"How so?"

"She's the first friend that I made of my own initiative. James and Sirius and Peter, in the beginning, I didn't think they'd want to be my friends, didn't even know what to do, but they kept pushing and pushing and they were the ones who befriended me. Lily's the first person _I_ befriended, and she's... she isn't afraid to let me know when she's displeased, but she's also... she isn't, I don't know, _afraid_ , that saying it, or hearing it either, would be putting the friendship in danger. The guys... all it took was for me to tell them that they were wrong, and they stopped being my friends. But Lily isn't like that."

"Then she is an excellent friend to have," his mother iterated with a nod. "And I, for one, am glad that you have her."

Exhaling, Remus felt something deep in his chest unclench at her words. It wasn't anything much, not really, but it felt a lot like it had a week ago, when he'd realized that he wasn't alone, that even if he'd lost all his old friends, his new one had stuck with him.

So maybe what he really needed to be okay was to find these little assurances, little pieces of himself and within himself, and to build something out of them, someone who was not a coward, and was not a pushover, a person his mother could be proud of.

* * *

"James, darling, could you come here for a moment, please?"

Summer life at the Potter Estate was languid and indulgent, and James had settled back into it within a day or two of coming back from Hogwarts. It wasn't too hard, of course; his parents were seemingly never-changing, and the slow routine of the Potter Estate was comforting and familiar enough the sixteen-year-old could slip into and out of it almost on demand.

He'd spent the morning horseback riding and flying, an activity that he thoroughly enjoyed but rarely got to indulge in. His parents had bought him his beloved Fiend, a spirited Granian stallion, when he'd turned fourteen, and the pair had since become a well-oiled speed machine, both on land and in the air. James usually spent his morning in this manner, and that got him rid of most of his usual restless energy.

And if it didn't, he'd found yesterday, there was always the option of simply transforming into Prongs and running as fast as he could. Perhaps Fiend would even be open to racing him, though James knew he'd never manage to outperform a winged horse bred for speed. But that wouldn't be the point, anyway, so James knew he wouldn't mind.

Hopping in his step as he chugged off dusty riding boots – he was sure one of their elves would pick them up and clean them; they always did – James trotted down the hall towards the sitting room in search of his mother, and found both her and his father ensconced in their usual seats, drinking their afternoon tea and eating scones, Fleamont in the large wing-backed chair with the local Muggle newspapers open in his hands, Euphemia half-sitting, half-laying on the ottoman with a book in her lap.

"Mummy?"

"Ah, there you are, darling," his mother said, extending her hand for him, that he took in both of his as he sat himself down beside her. "There is something your father and I wanted to speak with you about."

"Yeah? What's that, then?"

"You remember my friend Queenie Goldstein, from America? Well, a friend of hers is getting married to a British wizard in the fall, and so they've decided to come and see about the venue and the decorations and the dress, of course, and I've invited them to stay with us. It would be Queenie, Leonora Adelmann and her daughter Athenora, I believe she's around your age."

"And I'm guessing you wanted me to show Athenora around?" James asked, smirking lightly.

"I'm sure she will be a delightful companion for you this summer, and the house will be pleasantly lively, won't it, dear?" Euphemia directed her question to her husband, who hummed in agreement and lowered the newspaper slightly to give her a fond look. "In any case, I'm sure it won't take away from your practice time in the least, as I imagine Athenora will want to be quite involved in her mother's wedding organising."

"So does that mean you'll also be busy this summer?" he asked his mother with a teasing smile, which she answered with a delightful one of her own. She loved company, especially company that stayed over as guests.

"It does appear so, doesn't it? Of course, Queenie is also coming because her sister's daughter-in-law is due at the end of the summer, so she will likely be too busy with family to accompany us. But Leonora is a lovely woman, and I cannot imagine any child of hers to be anything else, so between us, I am convinced that we will absolutely manage. And if I ever need any assistance with carrying things during shopping and such..."

"I am at your service, Mummy dearest," James said with a dramatic sweep of his arm, "though I suggest you get the house-elves to help you instead. You know I'm horrid with your shopping sprees."

"That I do, darling, that I do," Euphemia agreed, patting his cheek lightly with her wrinkled hand. Feeling a sudden bout of childish affection, James took her hand and kissed the papery skin on its back, then kissed her cheek before getting up.

"Pops, let me know when you want us to go through the family accounts and whatnot."

"Oh? Does that mean you've decided on what to do after Hogwarts?"

James groaned. "Not really, no. But Pops, I don't think I want to be a businessman like you. It's..."

"Stationary?"

"Dull," he admitted. "I want something exciting."

"Politics can be quite exciting. Your grandfather caused plenty of ruckuses in his time in the Wizengamot, for instance, when that idiot Minister we had at the time refused help during the First World War."

"And got us excluded from the Sacred Twenty-Eight," James reminded his father. In answer, Fleamont waved the notion away with a careless flick of his wrist.

"Who even needs that? Cantankerous Nott was a complete buffoon about that ridiculous notion of Blood Purity; I'd rather we weren't associated with _his_ ideas."

"Whatever you say, Pops."

"Well, you really need to think on this soon, Son; now that you're past your O.W.L.s, it's important you choose the proper subjects for whatever you want to do afterwards."

James was, of course, more than aware of this; in fact, he knew very precisely _which_ subjects he'd be taking, because he'd already decided that he was going to become an Auror. But he was somewhat reluctant to share this with his parents, at least this soon in the summer. It could wait, and besides, it depended on his O.W.L. grades, as well. He was quite confident he'd done well, but one never knew.

"I know, don't worry. I'll figure it out on time."

"That's all I would expect from you, Son."

* * *

"You keep that, that... that _magic_ out of this house, boy! I _will not_ see it!"

"So don't look! It's my bloody room!"

"I _will_ know what is going on under _my_ roof! You do not get to tell me–"

"The number of things you don't know about me would buy you enough drink to last you until your liver liquefies of it, you wasteful drunkard!"

"I know that you are as worthless as your mother, boy, that's all I need to know! What is all that _magic_ good for if you can't even make yourself look presentable?! I don't dare show you anywhere with normal, God-fearing folks!"

"As if you know anything about respectable people! Go drown your useless self in the bottom of those pint glasses and leave me in peace!"

"If I see one more thing–"

"It's _my fucking room_! Stay the _hell_ away from it, or else I'll ward it so that you won't even know it exists anymore!"

"One toe out of line, boy, and I will make you regret it!"

" _I know! Go drink yourself into your usual stupor and leave me in fucking peace already!_ "

The bang of a door smashing into the frame rattled the whole house, and Severus exhaled forcibly, reaching in desperation for those few lessons in Occlumency he'd gotten over the last month, trying as hard as he could to partition and push down the impotent fury his father always awakened in him.

He'd been afraid to yell and fight, once. Back before and during the first years of his magical schooling, when his father had first started drinking heavily and then going off on him, Severus had cowed, had made sure to tiptoe and not arouse the man's fury, because he could be vicious in both tongue and hand, and he'd frightened even his magical, hard wife on some occasions, let alone an eight-year-old boy. But the drink had taken its due over the years, and Severus had grown tall and fast enough to not be such an easy target. He didn't hold his tongue back anymore, not unless his mother was within hearing distance. Tobias was usually too drunk to run up and down the stairs easily, and as a worst case option, Severus had set himself up with ways of climbing out of his room through the window. So long as he avoided being cornered, it wasn't terribly hard to avoid the man's punches, and given how much he drank on average, it was even a surprise the man could think, let alone remember what was said while he was sloshed.

There was a point in the early evening, though, that Severus knew to stay well away from the man. When he managed to find work, Tobias did do his utmost, at least for a time, to keep himself sober, if hungover, throughout the day, and those few hours between arriving home and being drunk were the danger zone, because he was irritable enough and sober enough to do real damage. This wasn't one of those times, however; by ten in the evening, the man was usually drunk enough, and given that it was Friday, Severus' provocation had practically earned him and his mother a completely peaceful night, because Tobias had a tendency to find his drinking buddies if he left this late, and crash at their place.

He wondered if his mother would be thankful for it, or resentful.

Pulling the enforced middle drawer of his dresser out, Severus stepped on it and reached for the hole in the wall behind the piece of furniture, where he kept his most prized possessions hidden from his father. The dresser was an old one, made of wood heavy enough it required some strength to move, and Severus had made sure to stick it to the ground with some less noticeable sticking charms, just to make it extra hard.

He drew his lovely new black wand from the hidey-hole and, making sure to shut the curtains tightly, settled himself on the bed and cast the Patronus Charm, forcing his mind away from the fury still roiling in his gut in favour of remembering Lily's fingers in his from last week's train ride. The doe was happy enough to let him pet her, and having the memory so tangible under his fingers served to calm him better than any Occlumency he'd learned so far. It was a crutch, he knew that perfectly well, but he didn't think even Dumbledore would admonish him for it, not after the week he'd survived.

He felt like all his hard work was slipping away from him, water through cupped fingers, until there was nothing left but the old anger and resentment, the one that had fed him for so long, and that had almost cost him the most precious thing he had in his life. It was so easy now, to forget Dumbledore's words, to forget those hours upon hours he'd spent in that office that housed the oddest of knick-knacks, where he'd learned to do this spell and where he'd found the other sides to himself that he'd forgotten – where he'd found the way to exist without being dependent on his tar-like anger.

Calmer, he recast the spell and let the doe settle on the bed next to him, with her head in his lap, the silvery substance of the spell feeling strangely tingly, peculiar, under his fingers. He wasn't tired, the adrenaline of the shouting match keeping him jittery enough that he could pour this into keeping hold of the memory that gave his doe her shape, into the magic she needed to keep existing. He knew he'd pay for this in the morning, but right now, he needed the comfort too much.

He missed Lily with a hungry ache. It had been a week since they'd parted at her front door, and they'd agreed to take some time to sort things out at home before meeting up again. They'd left it all vague, but there was an unspoken understanding where and when they'd be meeting, and Severus found his way to their tree every day at five-thirty in the afternoon, because even sitting for two hours in sweltering heat waiting for someone who wouldn't come was better than being in the house when Tobias dragged himself in, looking for his drink and a fight.

The doe Patronus made him think about the events of the last months, the train and the lake and the laboratory before it, her sobs and the weight of purposely unacknowledged truth in his stomach. About the trust that had once been given and taken freely between them, worn away under the grind of platitudes and white lies and disappointment. About the expectations failed, and the friendship almost lost, saved not by Severus' regrets and apologies, but by Dumbledore's assurances of his life choices.

They'd so fundamentally misunderstood each other over the last years, seeing what they wanted to see instead of what was really there, and in light of their conversation about trust, Severus could finally figure out where the problem had come about – Lily had trusted _him_ instead of her knowledge _of_ him, and so of course he'd continued to disappoint her when she'd believed him to be something he wasn't, when he'd not grasped that those two things were in fact separate and unequal, not in his own infatuated blindness about her faults.

And now that he understood that these two things differed, that relying on effectively predicting a person's thoughts and feelings and actions was not the same as putting your trust in them, now Severus thought of their other disagreement, over what friendship was and how much it was worth, and the memory of Lily's tear-stained face bubbled up past his mental shields, sweeping with it a terrifying coldness into his soul.

He'd told her that he'd learned all he knew of friendship from her, that theirs was the model by which he conducted all others, but friendship was based on trust, according to her, and the trust between him and Lily was as different as it could be from the trust on which his interactions with Avery's group rested, and that implied that the friendships were fundamentally different too – so did that mean that he was mistaken? Were those similarities he believed existed actually there, or had he let the assumption of similarity cloud his judgment?

This, _this_ was that one tripping point, the hinge around which all their interactions in the past revolved. If he'd only been seeing their friendship as exploitative and it actually hadn't been, what did that mean about his own actions in light of that view? _Had_ he been acting exploitatively towards Lily, or was this also something he was only perceiving wrongly? He'd never before thought to compare how he acted with her to how he acted with the Slytherins. Was this the reason for his own side of their misunderstanding, why he couldn't figure her out – because he'd been treating her according to a wrong assumption?

Lily had agreed with him about the similarities between their interactions and Severus' interactions with the Slytherins. She'd agreed with him so much that she'd broken down sobbing over it, over the way _she_ had acted towards _him_ , in the way _that made sense to him_ , and yet she'd completely fallen apart when she'd admitted it, and he'd not understood then, but it was so obvious now – she'd not _believed_ this to be the case, she had made it clear that she'd _never_ considered their friendship to be of the exploitative kind until two weeks ago, until he'd insisted, until–

Until he'd convinced her of something that had been his wrong perception. He'd defined friendship in the wrong way, using the wrong parameters, and he'd insisted that they were right until she'd agreed. She'd agreed, and it had broken her, but now he was coming to realise that this wasn't the truth, that this was wrong, so what if...

Had he made her doubt and question herself for a completely wrong perspective of the whole thing on his part?

That tremor in her voice, on the train last week, when she'd asked him if he trusted her after everything, now it made sense, and it made him sick to his stomach: because Lily, no matter whether she'd agreed with him or not, was not someone for whom this was _instinctive_ behaviour, and so she was not only dealing with finding a part of herself to be untrue to how she'd thought it was based on possibly faulty fact she'd gotten from _him_ , but also the influence she perceived that this had had on Severus, and this was something _she_ would not have been able to easily forgive or overcome, so she thought that he couldn't, either, when he'd never even thought twice about it.

His doe dissolved under his fingertips, letting his hand fall limply onto his thigh and dissipating all light in the room until Severus was sat in complete darkness. He barely noticed it, too stunned by his realisation to give thought to anything else.

It was guilt that _he_ had put there, Severus, that probably had no place to be there at all, and the worst part was that he even now didn't see a tenth of the devastation and harm that Lily did in such a perception of relationships. It hardly mattered, though, because he had _hurt Lily_ , he'd hurt her _again_ , and this time in a way she'd not even noticed, in a way _he'd_ not noticed. No wonder she was so tentative with him now, when he'd convinced her that all their previous interactions had not been genuinely truthful, when he'd made her lose her _trust_ them and in her perception of them. _Of course_ she'd been so stunned that he still trusted her, of course, now it made all the sense in the world.

This sort of deception wasn't in Lily's nature. He had somehow completely disregarded this fact, and whether it was because it was in the nature of every single other person he interacted with, or because he'd gotten the wrong impression and trusted in that instead of Lily herself when it came to how she saw him, or because things always seemed distorted when the relationship was discordant, it didn't change the fact that Lily's turmoil and distress were directly his fault.

The guilt that came with this realisation left Severus petrified with fear, because if their relationship failed _this time_ , it was going to be _his_ fault, and his alone, not Golden Boy Potter's, not because of their House rivalry, not his friends or hers, not Lily herself. It was going to be his, because he'd sown the seeds in his own utter blindness and misapprehension, and while the thought of losing her to an external influence was possibly the hardest one he'd ever had to face, the thought of losing her to _his own actions_... that was unbearable, in light of everything he'd gone through to avoid it and how it had changed her mind in the end, especially because there was one thing which he knew would lead to exactly this if he let things just continue on without changing them.

 _I am unbearably proud of you._

No one had ever told him that in his life, no one had said those exact words in that exact tone, as if they were choking on emotion, as if it was something that demanded to be given voice. Severus knew a lot about unbearable, and the thought that this was how Lily felt about his choice to side with her and Dumbledore and the Light, it vindicated _everything_ , every half-slept night, every nerve-racking encounter, every hurt feeling. In those days when he'd thought he'd lost her forever, driven by sheer desperation not to lose the purpose of it, Severus had owned his choice, had rethought it and re-appropriated it, had set it apart from everything Lily represented and meant to him, and this was something that remained with him even now when the need for it had turn moot, but it also didn't change the sheer _joy_ of having Lily be proud of his actions, nor the devastation of walking that path without her.

And none of it had changed the fact that he'd hurt her even before their conversation on Hogsmeade Weekend, hurt her by acting on beliefs and convictions that should have made it impossible for them to tolerate one another, hurt her for reasons that he'd not even thought to look for until she'd told him – _I know that one day, me being me won_ _'_ _t be enough, and you_ _'_ _ll find yourself using it purposefully on me, too_. That statement of hers was so terrifying exactly for the possibility that it held, because that word, that slur that he now hated from the bottom of his heart, it meant little on its own and much as an obvious representation of his whole system of belief – the one thing he now forced himself to acknowledge Lily would never be able to forgive, because after all, she barely had the last time, and Severus wasn't fool enough to think one ever got more than a single second chance.

Yes, he understood now that it was that system of belief, not the word itself, that had done the real damage during the O.W.L.s – had been doing the damage long before the incident by the lake, really; it was the thought that he saw her as worth less than, that he was incapable of believing in such a drastic double standard, that had frightened her and made her mistrust him, that had led to the distance between them and to the confusion about what sort of friendship they had, to Severus causing Lily so much upset two weeks ago. And really, for all of Severus' conviction – or perhaps, now he really thought of it, just wishful thinking – that she was wrong, he couldn't escape the fact that he had, in fact, reached for the belief that had felt more encompassing in the moment of his utter humiliation, had used it to hurt the one person he'd never thought himself capable of hurting.

Even if their friendship survived Lily's identity crisis, if it survived their fights and misunderstandings and drifting away, unless Severus truly found a way to change his own views on Muggles and Muggle-borns, it would be doomed to failure regardless, because those views would always be at the root of his own actions, and if something would finally drive her away from him, it would be his own actions, that was clear enough to him now that she was truly making an effort to rebuild their relationship from her side.

He didn't know how to do this, though. How was he supposed to suddenly start seeing something inherently _less_ than himself as equal, when his future only held the certainty of such company as believed the same things that he did? How was he supposed to balance Dumbledore's tasks with Lily's expectations, when both only needed one slip on his part to completely crumble beneath his feet? Because he fully remembered Lily's fury and outrage at the actions of his companions, at _his_ actions, towards the seventh years; she'd ultimately broken their friendship over the fact that he'd become so much like those other Slytherin boys, those Junior Death Eaters, and it was impossible to differentiate himself from them, despite his firm resolve to stand by his choice, to stand by the Light and her, because he found so much more in common with their beliefs than hers, because knowingly or not, he'd acted and done as they had, and if she knew, if she saw this to be the case before he figured out a way of changing his own beliefs, then that would be the end of it.

He couldn't even bear the thought of it, which meant that there was only one option left to him – he needed to make certain she never learned this truth while it was still true, needed to ensure that there was no way for her to grasp this before he managed to somehow make it obsolete.

* * *

Enid Pettigrew was in hospital. Peter had gotten this information from one of her nosy neighbours after he'd been knocking a bit too loudly on her door for a bit too long the night he arrived back from Hogwarts. According to the old nosy Muggle, she'd been run over by a car three days before, and though the man didn't know how she was, he did at least know which hospital she was in, so Peter wasted no time getting there.

It took him half an hour to get to the hospital, then another half hour of trying to convince them to let him see her in spite of the fact that the visiting hours were over, during which his frustration had made tears run over, just to make the humiliation so complete. Humiliating or not, though, the tears ended up being what worked, because the nurse on duty finally sighed and acquiesced to let him in for ten minutes.

Peter _detested_ people feeling sorry for him, despised the feeling from the bottom of his heart, but if life had taught him something, it was that you used whatever you had at your disposal, no matter how much it galled. So he did exactly that – he used the fact that this woman thought him a poor, distraught boy, and he got in, and that hatred he felt for her pity, he turned that into disdain, because it was his weapon, his spell, to get what he wanted, and she didn't even know.

His aunt was reading a book when he gently opened the door to the room, her bed on the far side of it, by the window. Of the other two, one was occupied by an elderly woman who appeared to be dozing, while the other was empty. He made less than three steps before Enid noticed him, and one look made her put down her book and give him a sad, gentle look.

"Oh, my darling," she whispered when he was close enough that he could hear her and they'd not disturb the other occupant of the room. Peter bent into the circle of her extended arms and buried his face into her neck, breathing in the familiar, mossy smell of her shampoo. "I am so, so sorry."

Peter shook his head and let her guide him to sit by her on the bed. His aunt's left leg all the way up to the hip was in a cast, and there was ugly, painful-looking bruising on that side of her face, too, with several cuts and gashes littering her pale skin. She looked like she had other injuries, too, but it was hard for Peter to figure that out, and he shied away from it at the thought of this further proof of his aunt's utter fragility.

"How is she?" was his aunt's first question, and when Peter clenched his fists in his lap, she covered the closer one with her wrinkled palm, that had an IV line stuck to the top of it.

"On a binge."

Enid sighed, closing her eyes, and her forehead furrowed in pain.

"She was looking forward to having you back, so much."

Peter unclenched his fist, and his aunt slid her fingers between his immediately.

"I feared she'd blame herself for my accident," Enid continued, subdued, hazel eyes gentle and loving as they roamed Peter's face. "We'd been shopping, and she wanted us to have lunch at the Leaky Cauldron – her treat, she said, with her first proper pay check, oh, Petey, she was so very proud of it too, I had so hoped – but I had a lesson and had to leave early, and she wanted to stay and finish her glass of butterbeer, and the driver came out of nowhere as I was stepping outside, didn't see me properly for the Muggle-repelling spells on the pub."

Peter knew the rest of that story intimately. "She thought that if she'd only come out with you, she'd have been able to prevent it, to Apparate you two or something."

"Yes, I believe so," Enid answered.

"She hasn't been able to Apparate successfully in years," was all that stuck in his mind at the thought.

"Oh, darling, you know it makes no difference," Enid reminded him. "Whether or not she could have used a spell to pull me out of the way, or anything else... it was an accident, Peter. Accidents happen. Your mother... your mother has lost her belief in such a thing a long time ago."

Peter clenched his aunt's hand and swallowed, shutting his eyes so tightly bright spots appeared in his black field of vision.

"I _hate_ him. _I hate_ _him_."

It was the one thing never spoken between the three of them, not since the day when Enid had sat him down and explained to him that his father was not coming back. But he couldn't hold it in, not anymore, and he didn't care if his words hurt the woman whose long-fingered hand was clutching his tightly.

"I do, too," she said, with such venom in her voice that Peter swallowed compulsively. He didn't dare look at her, at what he knew would be blazing in his aunt's eyes to accompany her voice, and a thought passed through his mind, that if his aunt but had the use of magic at her disposal, that she would have tracked her bastard of a brother down and murdered him in cold blood.

Peter felt his eyes filling with tears again, and hated himself for it, too.

 _I hate him, and I hate my mother, and I hate you too,_ he thought wildly, rattling inside his own skin, the need to shift and shrink and scurry away as a rat nearly overwhelming. _I hate you for getting hurt, and I hate her for being weak, and I hate him for leaving, and I hate my sodding life. I wish I was gone._

"Petey," his aunt's voice pulled him back from his mad thoughts, and he found that he'd become as tense as one of the strings in that piano his aunt loved so much. Breathing out, he forced himself to relax as he lifted his eyes to meet Enid's. "We will get through this summer, together. I will not leave you, broken hip or no."

He jumped off the bed, feeling a strange manic energy suffuse him.

"I'll go to St Mungo's, they'll have a healer who'll fix you right up. Or, or, a private physician. There is no reason for you to suffer the, the– what..." he took a breath, licking his lips, "what, uh, are your injuries, Aunty? I didn't, I should have asked that first, I'm sorry, I–"

Enid shushed him and shook her head. "Broken hip and leg, some internal bleeding – my troublesome kidney – but I will be fine. And you do not need to find any healers. In fact, I don't think it would be smart at all, while I'm here. When I'm released – I truly hope soon, but I live alone and they are reluctant – then all right, but bringing them here would mean changing records and changing memories and–"

"That's what magic is _for_ ," he said quietly, his energy leaving him as fast as it had come, so that now he simply felt defeated and clumsy.

"Perhaps, but you know magic isn't my world," she gently reminded him, and it stung, it stung to the quick, because why should it matter if she could do magic or not, why should it matter when magic could make everything so much easier.

He knew how to get her to agree, though, he knew the exact button to push – all he had to do was tell her he couldn't do it alone, he couldn't handle his mother alone, and she'd cave, of course she would, she'd never refuse him that, she loved him as a son – but one look at her tired face, and he remembered how much it had cost her to come back to the wizarding world properly after Peter's father had left them, and he couldn't do it.

If his aunt didn't want to take the benefit of something that had been unreachable to her, something that she'd had to learn to work around when her whole family benefited from it and looked down on her for her handicap, then that was her right, and Peter couldn't find it in himself to push her against it.

"All right," he told her. "But when you're home, will you please reconsider?"

"I will. I promise, darling," Enid answered. "Will you manage until then?"

He was going to handle his mother by himself; he was almost in his majority, he knew the back alleyways of London, both magical and Muggle, like the palm of his hand, and it was his due, anyway. Lauris was his mother, nothing at all by blood to Enid, and Peter would shoulder that burden alone.

Perhaps he was weak and stupid and clumsy, as Sirius and James believed, but it was the best that his mother had, and so he would not disappoint her, like she'd been disappointing him for what felt like his whole life. And he was _certainly_ not going to disappoint Enid, who was the one good thing he had to call his own in this miserable life outside of Hogwarts.

Peter decided; he was going to do whatever it took, use whichever skills he had at his disposal, and he was going to manage it alone.

"Yes. I'll be fine."

* * *

Lily found Petunia in her room, sitting on the bed with another magazine in her hands, with the fan turned to the highest blowing straight into her face. Her hair was pulled back into a bun, but it looked limp and sweaty, and there was a damp spot on her summer dress, starting at her collarbone and moving down between her breasts. Lily felt instant sympathy as she wiped her own perspiration off her forehead. They had an air conditioner downstairs in the living room, but not in their rooms, and the heat hadn't abated since she'd come home; if anything, it had only gotten worse.

Lily herself had escaped the living room, though, because her mother had invited Guthrie Dalloway for tea and biscuits, the father of Lily and Petunia's old primary school friends Martine and Marissa, with whom Lily hadn't spoken in years – though her father had informed her in one of his recent letters that Petunia and Martine were certainly still the best of friends, and were going to be moving into a flat together in London in the fall, for Martine's university and Petunia's typist courses. Lily assumed her mother and Mr Dalloway would be talking particulars on this topic and, hoping very dearly that she wouldn't come up in discussion (because they might raise some rather uncomfortable questions as to why she wasn't still friends with Marissa that Lily really knew she couldn't honestly answer), she'd decided to take her leave to lessen the temptation. Additionally, she found herself a bit worried about her mother slipping up about magic if she stayed where Monica could see her, and if this was just her growing paranoia speaking, of being cornered into yet _another_ conversation about magic, then she didn't care one iota about it.

"What d'you want?" Petunia asked, not even looking up from her magazine.

"I wanted to ask you if you'd have time this week to go shopping?"

Frowning in condescending disbelief, Petunia looked up at her.

"You weren't seriously _expecting_ me to go along with Mum's ridiculous idea, were you?"

"I didn't think it was ridiculous," Lily replied, frowning herself. "I _do_ need the clothes, and you'd know where all the best stores are far better than I."

"Yes, because the only place you ever shop is that Zigzag Alley down in London."

"Diagon Alley," the correction slipped with the spark of annoyance that shot through Lily. She always did this, her sister – pretended that she knew nothing of Lily's world, that it was so inconsequential she couldn't be bothered to remember, when she knew it all just to do things like this, out of spite. Petunia made a snitty face at her and looked down at her own magazine demonstratively. "Look, Tuney–"

"What, Liliput?" Petunia snapped back, smacking the magazine on the bed with repressed fury. "What is it you want from me?"

Lily began considering immediate retreat. When Petunia started resorting to that detestable nickname she'd come up with during their earliest childhood, it meant she was not going to be reasoned with. But Lily had come here with a purpose, and she wasn't going to let Petunia dictate this conversation, not this time.

"I would like to spend time with you, as a matter of fact," she said bluntly, and a bit snippily, instead. "I've not seen you in six months, and we've not done one thing together since I've come home for the summer. If you'd rather do something else..."

"We have spent far too much time together, if you ask me; I cannot seem to escape you, as a matter of fact!"

"What?"

"Every time you come back into the house, all anyone _ever_ talks about is 'Lily this' and 'Lily that' and 'oh, isn't magical Lily so, so much better than her plain, average sister Petunia'! I am _sick_ of listening to the same thing _over and over_!"

"I don't want to talk about it any more than you do!" Lily exclaimed, exasperated by Petunia's stubborn persistence to pick a fight, the sweat sliding down her own back, and the damnable _heat_ she couldn't escape. "I'm sick of it, too, you know!"

"Oh, don't pretend you don't adore their attention," Petunia said snidely. "Lily the perfect daugh–"

"I'm not, alright?! I'm not perfect, Petunia, and you have no idea how utterly _frustrating_ it is to have her keep saying it _over and over_ and then not paying a bit of attention to what I'm actually _telling her_!"

"So, you _don_ _'_ _t_ want their attention all of a sudden?" the older girl asked, for the first time in the conversation sounding genuinely incredulous.

"No! I want them to leave well enough alone and talk about _anything_ other than Hogwarts!"

"Why?"

"I–" stalling, Lily shut her mouth and shook her head. "Why should I tell you? You'll only use it to put me down about my problems, like you always do."

"It's got to do with Snape, doesn't it?" Petunia said shrewdly, startling Lily with her perceptiveness; she always forgot that Petunia was actually more than a little intelligent, and knew how to use it in the most uncomfortable of ways.

"I am _not_ talking to you about Severus; all you'll do is insult him and then insult me for having him as a friend."

"So it _is_ about him. What's he done now?"

"What?"

"Out with it, Lily," Petunia demanded, climbing to her feet. "What's he _done_?"

"Nothing! Or, not– look, it's irrelevant; I'm dealing with it."

"Lily–"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Petunia! Let it go!"

"Just _tell_ me!"

"He called me 'Mudblood'!"

In the silence that followed, Lily shut her eyes tightly and took a moment to wonder, through her laboured breath, whether she could sneak her way into the Ministry of Magic and steal a Time-Turner, just the once.

Maybe throwing herself out of the window would be more effective. Time-Turners worked on a stable time loop principle, after all; it wasn't like she'd be able to stop herself from blurting that little gem out with one, anyway.

"He did _what_?"

"Tuney..."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Snapping her eyes open, Lily glared incredulously at the older girl. "Because I get the feeling that you don't actually _want_ to know anything about my life? You sure do put me down for it, and besides, I know how much you hate Severus."

"That nasty little freak. You've broken off with him for good, now, haven't you?"

Lily's patience snapped. "As a matter of fact, Petunia, I've not, and I am not telling you any of my reasons for it, either, because you don't get to use this to evade the original topic, and you _certainly_ don't get to act antagonistic one minute and overprotective the next! Pick one and stick with it, yeah?"

Clearly insulted, Petunia sniffed at her and crossed her arms over her chest.

"Very well; if you choose to be like that–"

"If _I_ choose to be–" From somewhere in the back of her mind, Lily dredged up the initial intent of her visit to her sister's room. "No. No, you are not doing this again. I came here to ask you if you'd like to spend time with me by going shopping, because I need new clothes, and you know far more about fashion than I do. I will not let you goad me into a fight just so that you can feel righteous about refusing me."

"Righteous? Is that what I feel?"

"Well, you certainly act it, don't you?"

" _You_ are the one hogging attention in this house! You are the one who is praised and glorified, while all I ever accomplish is completely irrelevant to Mum and Dad! All–"

"You're right."

"–they ever– I'm sorry, _what_?"

"I said, you're right."

 _Finally_ , that shut her up.

"I'm right?"

"Yes."

"So now you're mocking me."

"No, I'm perfectly serious. You are right, I seem to be all they talk about, and they're being utterly unrealistic about me, too. I don't actually _like_ being thought of as perfect, Petunia, it makes me feel like I can't satisfy their expectations, which is not a nice feeling, as you so well must know." Sighing, Lily wiped the sweat off the back of her neck. "Petunia, please. I don't want to fight with you, I don't want to have these standoffs with you. I want... I want us to not spend this whole _bloody freaking unbearably hot_ summer at each other's throats. Is that something you'd be open to, or should I just not talk to you until September at all? Because just now, I'd rather have two months of silence than two months of fighting."

Petunia stared at her as if Lily was some alien she'd never been confronted with before, and Lily felt her little flame of hope resignedly wilting. She'd expected something like this, of course, but she'd still found herself reaching for–

"Very well; what do you need?"

"What?"

"The clothes? That's why you're here, aren't you? Clothes shopping?"

"I... shirts. I need shirts that fit me better; I think my, er, my bust has grown some more in the last half-year, I can't button mine the shirts up without that horrid, embarrassing hole between buttons appearing over it. And a bathing suit or two. Especially if it's going to be this hot the whole bloody summer."

"I can do Friday, if you're actually going to condescend to listen to me for once about the fashion."

"I'm vetoing stuff I hate, and if I fall in love with something, I reserve the right to buy it – you aren't getting a _carte blanche_ to police my style – but otherwise, yes, I promise to defer to your superior knowledge of the fashion."

Petunia measured her sharply, no doubt trying to figure out if Lily was genuine, and whatever she found obviously wasn't a singing-praises kind of endorsement, but it was enough.

"All right. I need to get some catalogues for you look through, and we're going to go through them on Thursday to figure out which stores to target; I refuse to walk around like a headless chicken in this heat while you try to make up your mind between one boring shirt and another."

For a moment Lily felt genuinely insulted, but forced herself to let it go. Baby steps. Even this much was better than she'd had half an hour ago, and if she could only train herself to ignore her sister's snide digs and jabs that peppered every other sentence, she thought she might actually succeed in finding _something_ that could serve as a shared activity through which they could bond.

"Good, thanks; I'd not want to spend hours trudging around with shopping bags either."

They left it at that, which was not nearly what Lily had truly wished for, but was far better than she'd thought she'd get.

Baby steps. Lily supposed that was as good a mantra as anything.

* * *

 **A/N:** Some Americans are popping up soonish, which means that there will be some names showing up from _Fantastic Beasts_. This is names _only_ \- Queenie Goldstein isn't a character in this story, and beyond her being the sister of Porpentina Goldstein who is the wife of Newt Scamander, I am not taking anything from the new canon as fact or part of my universe. The same goes for Ilvermorny - it's one of the North American magical schools (because there has _got_ to be more than one, and certainly more than only of British origins), but all that Pottermore rot about how it was created and how it functions is null and void here, because it's derivative and unimaginative of already existing material, even without going into the rest of the mess that is JKR's attempt at creating American magical history (if you don't know what I'm talking about, look up the criticism of JKR's pretty colonialist reappropriation of Native American heritage). When and if I need details, I'll decide on whether I'll use any of the new canon or not, but either way, I'll make sure to explain everything so as to not create any confusion in my own text. For now, all that's relevant is that these people and places exist in the background and that's where they'll stay.

Also, the references to how hot the summer is will be continuing (actually, the weather almost became an extra character in a way) because the summer of 1976 was the driest, hottest summer in Britain's history of weather recording up until then, resulting in serious droughts all throughout the country, to the point where they even appointed a 'Minister for Drought' (that everyone made fun of). Given that rainy weather is almost a staple of Britain's depiction in fiction, I think the fact that they had practically no rainfall at all in months illustrates the severity of the situation nicely.


	21. Ch II,18: To Mend Bridges

**A/N:** For those who might find it triggering, note that Peter's section contain depictions and talk of long-term drug abuse.

 **Chapter 18: To Mend Bridges**

That first morning of the summer hols, Peter found himself awake at the crack of dawn with practically no will to get out of his bed. Having dragged himself home from the hospital the previous night with little hope for the summer, in the pale light of the rising sun, the prospects didn't look any more favourable to him in the least.

He wished he could just lower the blinds and crawl back into bed under the metaphorical covers (it was too hot for literal ones, unfortunately), but that really was not an option at all. Cleaning awaited, and beyond that, a much more important task, which was getting his mother weaned off the damned heroin and back onto lighter opiates again.

Peter had long ago given up trying to get his mother clean of the drugs. She'd been using since he was roughly four years old – at first it had been sleeping potions, then Muggle pills, and then a bad fall had landed her in the Muggle hospital when he'd been eight or nine, and they'd given her some opiate-based painkillers for the short-term pain management, which she'd jumped on almost like a cat to cream, and that had been that. She was a functioning addict, for the most part, dependent on the emotional currents of her existence – when life wasn't pressuring her too much, she found the strength to keep it to her own minimum, mostly, Peter suspected, because she knew how unhappy her addiction made both him and Enid; when life became hard, though, when she felt out of control, as if she couldn't handle things that came her way, then her use intensified until she had periods of near-total drug haze. Enid and Peter had gotten good in weaning her back to minimal levels, and the hardest part, always, was clearing her thoughts enough to make her work with them. She wanted to, most of the time, and especially if it was Peter asking it of her. She loved him to her best ability, and over the years, Peter had mostly made peace with it. If it meant that she could function enough to hug him and genuinely laugh with him when they watched comedy shows on television, then he didn't feel he had much of a choice.

He dragged himself out of bed, relieved himself in the dirty toilet – that was number one priority, and part of what made him detest opioids _so bloody much_ , because they wreaked havoc with the user's digestive tract, both during use and during withdrawal. After changing into the rattiest shirt and shorts he could find, he dug through the medicine cabinet in search of whatever his mother was currently using for constipation, which he carried to her bed along with a big bottle of water, where she'd see them first thing when she woke up. By the time he'd cleaned the little bathroom, she was starting to move about the kitchen, and the shame on her face when he walked in still wearing the long rubber gloves was of the deepest kind.

She was still rail-thin, but that had been her natural state for years now. She looked exhausted, with deep circles under her eyes and sweat along her brow already, though Peter couldn't tell whether this was because it was time for another hit, or because it was just so _bloody hot_ – he himself was soaked through, and it was barely eight-thirty in the morning. Her light brown hair was stringy, tied back, and he made a note to get her to shower and cut it for her into something more presentable.

More than anything, she looked like his mother, and that always squeezed his heart so tightly in his chest that he sometimes imagined he couldn't draw enough breath into his lungs for having to look at her doing this to herself, even though he hardly knew how she'd looked back before his father had skipped out, when life had – supposedly – been good.

"Petey."

"Hey, Ma," he answered quietly.

"I'm so, so sorry, Petey. I didn't mean for this to happen."

"I know, but we're going to get through it, yeah?"

She nodded, licking her lips. "You don't have to– if you give me an hour, after the, the dose, I can–"

"No," he cut her off firmly. "No magic right after, you know what always happens, and you can't do it when I'm here anyway, we're not registered with the Ministry and I'm still a minor. I'll take care of it, all of it," _I always do, don_ _'_ _t I, Ma, I_ _'_ _ve had to do this since I was twelve years old_ , "and you are going to take the laxative and drink all that water and go to the toilet while I set up your dose, you just have to tell me where you're at now so I know how much you need."

"I've been good with it, careful, took it every day, I promise," she said about the laxative, taking an abortive step towards him. "It's not been so bad."

"Okay," he agreed with a sigh, though personally he wasn't so sure. This was a battle as old as her opiate addiction, and it had just as many ups and downs. "I need you to give me the address of your work, I'll send them an owl to let them know you need a few sick days, and we're going to get you in shape to go back."

"Oh, Merlin, what if they – Petey, I'm _so_ sorry – I tried my hardest – I wanted you to be p-proud of me–"

She dissolved into tears, and Peter sighed again, pulling off the gloves so that he could hug her to himself. He was short – the shortest of his friends – but Lauris was shorter still, and when she shook like the leaf and sobbed into his shoulder, he didn't know how he felt. Ten feet tall, that he could be her support when she needed it the most; infinitely disappointed and disgusted that she was so weak; absolutely resigned to the ever-unchanging status quo; achingly hurt that he was never enough; deeply ashamed for not being able to do more.

He ushered her to her room to start her up on dealing with the necessities, while he put together as healthy a breakfast as he could with the few groceries he'd bought on the way back from the hospital last night, using the motions of it to steel himself for the process ahead. When that was done, he found her paraphernalia and sat down at the kitchen table to prepare the drugs.

He despised knowing this process, despised the fact that at barely fourteen years old, he'd had to be sat down with a drug dealer so that he could learn the proper way of preparing heroin for intravenous use. The man in question – a Muggle or maybe a Squib some years older than Lauris by the name of Jared – was her only true connection to the drug scene, the one who'd taught both her and Peter the safest ways of taking drugs, whom they trusted to sell them acceptable quality stuff, and who was, for all that he was a toughened drug dealer, genuinely understanding to their circumstances. Enid had been the one to put them in touch with the man when it had become obvious that it was either that or risk Lauris getting desperate enough to make some enormously bad judgment calls in search of the numbness and high, just another non-magical floating on the edges of the Wizarding world. In many ways, they'd been lucky not to get taken advantage of; Jared always seemed supportive of Lauris cleaning up, no matter his business. Perhaps they simply brought him too little money for him to worry about one sporadic customer, or maybe it was because of that tangential connection to magic that they all had in common, directly or not. It didn't matter.

He'd need to go out and find some other opiate, something cheaper and less euphoric, to transfer her back onto, because she couldn't stay on heroin, not when Enid was not capable of handling her and Peter was back at Hogwarts. But that was for later; for now, he had a different task, to wean her back down to more acceptable levels, levels where she could function without attracting too much attention, levels just enough to keep the withdrawal symptoms away while still letting her think as clearly as possible.

Merlin, he hated being home, alone and isolated from the wizarding world even though there was no real reason for it.

Unbidden, his thoughts turned to Remus, and he wondered how the other boy was doing, if Remus was going to go back to the Shrieking Shack for the next transformation or stay at home. The last transformation had been traumatic for Peter, because being so small next to an enraged werewolf seemingly hell-bent on devouring you would give anyone nightmares. But he didn't regret it, not really. His size had been protection in itself, and they'd made plenty of modifications to the Shack to allow comfortable escapes and safe places for him in the walls, and perhaps a part of him really did believe that the wolf had not truly intended serious harm. It was hard to tell, sometimes, where Remus stopped and the wolf began, but unlike James and Sirius, Peter had done his research in this direction – what did it matter to him in which way a werewolf differed physically from a normal wolf, when he could intuit instinctively from their smell; but knowing whether it was still his friend looking back at him through those yellow eyes or if it was an unknown entity entirely, that was crucial on so many levels. So he'd looked into it, had gone into those books his friends wouldn't touch for the word 'Dark' on the covers, and he knew, maybe the only one who truly did, that when stripped down to their cores, Remus and the wolf were one and the same, and in spite of everything else, Peter trusted Remus, in a way he didn't trust Sirius and James, to have his back, to be a better friend.

James and Sirius – maybe even Remus, most of the time – thought Peter thick, because he got middling grades and had trouble with pointless magic, and couldn't remember things as well as they could. Maybe he was exactly as thick and stupid as they always implied, but in Peter's world, most of those things were useless anyway, so what was the point? No magic could help him know how to prepare just the right dosage of liquid heroin for his mother, or how to properly clean used needles, and certainly no magic had ever helped him win the boys' protection – Remus was the smartest of their group, the brainiac, and where had that gotten him? He was still the outcast in the end.

James and Sirius didn't respect that, and Peter had understood that from the start, so what would have been the point of bending over backwards to get the best grades in the first place? Standing up to them – that was also something they didn't want, they'd made that abundantly clear last month. Hogwarts was in so many ways exactly the same as the London underbelly, no matter what message Dumbledore and the other Gryffindors liked to espouse about it; the weak got picked off, the nails sticking out got hammered back in, and it had been easy to slip into the same sort of behaviour at school that he had for London, to defer to those who could protect him, and keep his head down.

Lauris emerged from the bathroom, looking marginally more presentable, and Peter paused in his internal debate as he served her breakfast and busied himself with cleaning the spoon and those needles he'd collected last night, properly this time.

"Do you know about Enid?" Lauris asked him softly.

"Yeah, Ma," he confirmed. "I went to see her last night."

"Maybe... maybe we could find her a proper healer?"

"She doesn't want that until she's released from the hospital. She'll need our help either way, Ma."

Lauris nodded, swallowing with difficulty. "I know, Petey, and I want to – I just – I'm not well, I – what if I mess it all up, what if I–"

"You won't, Ma," Peter hurried to assure her, placing his hand on her shoulder until she relaxed slightly. "I'll take care of you, and together, we'll take care of her, yeah?"

She leaned against him, resting her cheek on his stomach, and he ran his hand gently through her freshly washed hair. "You always take care of me. My beautiful boy."

"I'll always take care of you, but I need you to be strong, yeah? Just for a little while, until we get you over this bump."

"I'll try, Petey. I'll do my best, and I want to – but I need... I need it. Please."

She'd eaten more than half he'd put in front of her, and though it was still too little for his taste, Peter acquiesced, because he could see how her hands were shaking slightly, and how her face contorted from the craving.

"Let's do it on the couch, so you can lie down afterwards."

She remained passive as he tightened the tubing over her upper arm and ran his fingers over the inside of her elbow, the dark vein bulging slightly under the skin. This was the second worst part, really, having to plunge the needle in, watching the liquid in it stain red as he made sure he'd done it right. The absolute worst was seeing the way her expression morphed from the frown to that of utter ecstasy as the drug hit her and she sighed, almost in bliss.

But Peter was an old pro at this, and he'd long ago stopped feeling that kind of visceral gut reaction to the sight. Instead, he simply rested her down on the couch and turned back to cleaning the rest of the apartment, knowing that his banging and clanking wouldn't even register with her, not for another hour or two at least.

To distract himself, he turned back to the thoughts of his friends, wondering what it was that they truly saw in him, that was the reason why they kept him close. He'd thought, until Remus, that it was because, like most Gryffindors, they thought simply enough in terms of 'friend' and 'enemy', and he fell under the first. He thought that it was enough, no matter that he himself hardly understood it. But that obviously wasn't it, when they'd considered Remus their friend, and yet had rejected and discarded him so easily, so cruelly.

Peter had understood why Remus had been so hurt by Sirius' actions. No matter how Peter himself had seen that situation with Snape back in February – in terms of cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis – Sirius had obviously not thought anything of it past hurting someone he hated, even if it meant losing one of his friends over it. It made Peter wonder who the cold one of the two of them was in that situation – because Peter had known, oh, he'd known _very_ well, what the consequence was of their action, even as Sirius had done it, had let Snape overhear them and then gone and told him point-blank how to get past the Whomping Willow in a jeer that he'd known the greasy-haired boy wouldn't have been able to resist. And Peter hadn't encouraged him, not really, but then he'd not stopped him either, had he, because there had been no need for him to do either of those things, no benefit for him when the cost would have been too high for him to pay.

But if they could do this to Remus, whom they loved and considered one of their own, whom they didn't belittle and put down, then what chance was there for Peter, who was just a tag-along?

There was something like disappointment curdling his stomach at the thought, something tasting of bile in the same way that seeing his mother high did. He'd thought he could rely on their loyalty to their friends – Sirius' was certainly the fiercest Peter had ever seen in his life – but now it seemed so much clearer to him that their particular brand of loyalty, Sirius' and James', was reserved only for each other. He could no longer trust it, else he'd get burned like Remus had, and he couldn't afford that, not with the way things were going.

Well, if he couldn't count on them, a rebellious, proud part of him thought snidely, then why should he follow their lead in everything? Remus was his friend, too, and he'd not signed up for kicking him out of the group. Frankly, even if he had thought the other boy was completely overreacting, he understood Remus' hurt far more than any of the others could ever imagine – being responsible for the destruction of another's life was a heavy burden, even if it was in the process of helping them, let alone without your own control, and for a malicious purpose. And helping Remus with his transformations, that had made Peter finally feel _good_ about himself for once, feel like this time, he _was_ helping, _only_ helping.

Taking out the rubbish, he began composing a conciliatory letter to Remus in his mind, and trying to figure out if there was any way that he could meet up with Remus over the summer during the transformation – not even a little bit likely, with their financial situation and how things currently were at home, but it wasn't a bad idea to toss around one's head nonetheless; Remus deserved it more than James and Sirius ever had, anyway. Remus, at least, genuinely cared.

* * *

Mid-afternoon on the last day of June, Lily finally found herself walking to the old spot that she and Severus had claimed for themselves years before. It was going on late afternoon, almost six, and the heat did not appear to be waning in the least. She'd already had two short, cold showers today – though by the looks of the news, the draught was starting to grow into a true concern, so who knew how much longer she'd have that option – and half a block away from her home, she was already sweating uncomfortably, though she was dressed in an airy spaghetti-strap pale green shirt and high-cut short white shorts that she'd bought last year despite Petunia's grumbling. She'd tied her hair back, hating its damn volume, and had stuffed her wide-brimmed hat on to try and shield her face at least a little. She'd even remembered to put suntan lotion on her exposed arms and legs, but she had a nasty suspicion she'd end up burning anyway.

Perhaps Severus would be willing to make her some of that sunburn salve he'd specialised for himself. She'd have to ask him for it.

She saw him sitting in the shade of their tree from quite a distance, and just the sight of him made her feel faint from heat – his only concession to the relentless temperature were rolled up sleeves of a white button-down shirt, and he even had socks on, peeking out from below the bottom of his dress trousers. A stray thought floated through her mind, that the first thing she was going to do when he could earn some money of his own was take him clothes shopping.

She thought she caught his eyes sweeping up and down her frame as she walked up to him, and when they met hers, they looked a little glazed, making her thankful for the fact that her face was already flaming from the physical exertion and heat, and would thus hide her blush when it came to her that he'd most likely ogled her a bit.

For her part, Lily mostly felt a bubbly kind of elation at the fact that even though she'd not been able to come before, he was nonetheless waiting for her. It was tinged with guilt, because a part of her knew that it probably meant he'd been coming here every day, but she didn't allow herself to feel bad about it. They'd not agreed on anything concrete, almost on purpose, and Severus had known that all he actually had to do to see her was knock on her door.

It was one of the resolutions she'd made since deciding she needed to re-evaluate her own actions towards others, this one a resolution to herself – she was not going to lay claim to actions of others, be they good or bad, and she was not going to use that claim to warp her own perceptions of others, or, worse still, use it to manipulate them to suit her purposes. Severus' actions were his own, no matter his motives, and, at least in his case, Lily was determined to try very, very hard to take them as they were, without immediate assumptions about what those actions meant in any specific context. She'd made far too many wrong assumptions about his actions in the last six months, and she'd acted on too many false beliefs when it came to Severus for years, to be willing to risk their fledgling connection by repeating her own mistakes.

It was, after all, what she was trying to do with Petunia, as well.

A bit out of breath from the sweltering heat, Lily plopped down onto the grass next to him and groaned, closing her eyes for a moment. "Merlin, must be thirty-five degrees today." She wiped her sweaty forehead with the heel of her hand, dislodging her hat a bit, and gave him a contented smile, feeling the tension drain out of her own frame at his proximity. "Hello, Sev."

"Hi, Lily," he answered quietly, with more emotion on his face than she knew what to do with. Instead, she looked away, stretching her legs in front of her and toeing off her flats so that she could air out her toes.

"I'm sorry I couldn't come before," she found herself compelled to say. "Home has been... not what I'd been expecting."

"How so?"

She shrugged. "I feel like I've missed something, some big event that everyone else had gone through and now refuse to talk about. I think a big part of it is that _I'm_ not the same anymore. I don't know; I keep trying to remember how things were in the previous years, keep trying to find some indication that it _wasn't_ like this all along, and I keep failing." She twisted a strand of grass between two fingers and sighed. "I spoke with Petunia yesterday, a bit more honestly than usual, and for all that she blames me for so many ridiculous things, I suppose... I sort of am starting to see that some of the things she says aren't exactly baseless."

"You mean, her accusations of you being a _freak_?"

His tone of voice reminded her why she rarely told him anything about Petunia; those two hated each other, and Lily had learned early on that it was the safest for everyone if they didn't have much contact.

"I mean her accusations of our parents always favouring me."

He pulled back slightly, looking almost enraged for a moment. "You cannot be telling me that there's actual _truth–_ "

"But that's the point," she interrupted him. "There _is_... just not intentional. I honestly don't think either of them realise what they're doing. Mum keeps bringing our conversations back to me and Hogwarts, and now that I don't actually want to talk about it, I see just how much she does it. And she has this way of making the wizarding world seem, I don't know, exotic or something, by calling _everything_ Muggle ordinary, and in the process, she's accidentally dismissing Petunia's interests and accomplishments without really doing it. That's got to be what Tuney's been picking up on all this time."

"You are giving her too much credit," he said derisively. "Tuney is petty and vindictive, and she's been jealous of you for years for being magical. She'd invent whatever suited her to make you the villain in her narrow little world."

Some part of her reared up in protest at his words, the part of her that still constantly insisted that Petunia was different from everyone else, no matter how she behaved.

"She's my _sister_ , Severus! The very least I owe her is to try and see things from her point of view."

"I don't see why; she'd never do the same thing for you."

It figured that he'd see things in this way; not only was he a Slytherin, he also evaluated relationships differently than she did. He'd told her himself, after all, hadn't he, that for him, friendship was mutual exploitation between two individuals. No doubt this extended to detrimental actions, as well as beneficial.

"Relationships aren't supposed to work that way, Severus," she tried to explain. "It's not about whether or not she'd do the same for me, it's about the fact that I want to have some sort of relationship with her, and if I don't find a way to do so now, then I risk having things go so wrong that we'd never manage to repair it."

And when she said it, it sounded so much like her friendship with him, that it gave her the chills.

"So, you'll just keep trying to pacify her and ignore the fact that she won't do the same for you?"

"No, not–" She wasn't sure how to explain, exactly, but she wanted to be honest with him about it. "I know that wouldn't work either, not if I want it to be anything but superficial, and perhaps my relationship with her _can't_ be anything but superficial when you come right down to it, but at least I can try to make it honest in its superficiality. And it's not about her, even, so much as about myself." She looked at him, at the tense line of his shoulders and the hunch that indicated he wasn't relaxed, even here, in their childhood spot, with just her to see; it made her heart clench painfully at the reminder of just how much she'd screwed things up with him. "I was unfair to you about Potter and his group, and I don't want to repeat that mistake with her. I want to be _better_ than I've been to all the people important to me, and that includes her. And sometimes, if you want a relationship to survive, then you have to sacrifice for it."

"It's a pointless sacrifice," Severus said, shaking his head. "There is nothing to say that she'd ever change her mind about you."

"She's my sister," was all Lily could say, having resigned herself to that illogicality of her own emotions. "That's all the reason I need."

"I... can't understand that."

Of course he couldn't; he didn't have siblings, and his relationship with his parents was abysmal. She found herself, to some surprise, utterly devoid of blame or judgment of him for it. Just sadness.

"I know you can't." She sighed and leaned back on her arms to stare at the sunlight shining through the tree leaves, squinting at the glare. "How are things at your home?"

"Same."

She peered sideways at him, at the sullen way he'd said the word, at the tension in his shoulders.

"Severus, you don't have to lie to me," she said quietly. "If you'd rather not talk about it, that's fine. I don't... want to make you feel like I'm interrogating you about it every time I ask."

His answer was a great exhalation, even as he slumped further into himself, a bead of sweat sliding past his ear, catching against the coarse, unevenly spread bristles of facial hair. Lily wondered how often he had to shave these days; they'd never talked about that before, about being a teenager and going through puberty. She wanted to, suddenly, though now wasn't the time.

"It's... harder. It's not any better or worse, they're the same, but it's still different."

"Because you're different," she finished for him with a nod. "I suppose... we have about the same problem." It was a comforting thought.

"What's the point, though?" he asked, resting his chin on his knees as he stared at the little river flowing through Cokeworth, its level lower now than Lily could remember ever seeing it. "We both wish to change so that our friendship endures; _they_ won't change, so what's the point of even trying with them?"

"I suppose... perhaps, if we change, then all our relationships will change too, not just yours and my friendship," Lily mused. "Perhaps that's enough."

"Unless she pushes you to become someone who suits her, just because you're desperate enough to keep your relationship with her," he warned, voice sharpening in clear displeasure.

Lily swallowed. "Do you think I would?"

"I don't know, Lily," Severus replied, uncoiling and letting his spine straighten; a different kind of tension, different kind of closing from the world and her. "I just know that she doesn't deserve it."

"I'm sure she'd say the same thing about you," Lily replied, snorting sardonically.

"Except I'm willing to _try_ ," he snapped.

"Maybe she'll be, too; how would you know?"

"That's wishful thinking, Lily, and you know it perfectly well. If you delude yourself on this, she'll just–"

Sitting up, Lily turned her head sharply to him, feeling her own spine stiffen.

"What? She'll hurt me? Break my heart? Not like I don't have experience with that already."

He jerked away from her as if she'd struck him, and she shut her eyes, immediately regretting her harsh words. She'd thought she'd gotten over the pain, but perhaps she wasn't quite there yet, at least not to the point where she could stomach his hypocrisy in this.

"I didn't mean – I only meant – Lily, I'm sorry, it's–"

"What _did_ you mean?" she interrupted him, unwilling to re-tread that old ground. They'd put this to rest before the holidays, and Lily was more than eager to let it lie there.

Not to mention that she detested his usual stumbling over his own words when he was flustered.

"I meant that..." he licked his lips and bit the lower one for a moment, clearly trying to construct his sentence in a satisfactory way, "that I'm just wondering... where your line with her is."

Lily's shoulders dropped. For all that they hated each other, Severus and Petunia shared some rather similar priorities.

"I suppose I'll know when I reach it. And if I do, and there's no going back from that, I will have at least done everything I could to stop it from happening." Like she knew she had not done with Severus. She was not going to let that happen again, with anyone, and certainly not with her only sibling. "I told you, it doesn't matter if it's unequal; so long as I remember that it is and keep my expectations at appropriate levels to that, I don't see why it shouldn't work. It won't be a _fulfilling_ relationship, but, well... it's better than nothing to me, even if it isn't for you."

"That's not fair, Lily," he shot back. "You said yourself that her being your sister makes everything different."

"Perhaps, but you tell me if anything's changed in your relationship with your mother since your meetings with Dumbledore started."

His expression shuttering, he turned away from her, curling back into himself, making Lily realise she'd stepped into it in some way she had no true grasp on.

It was only their second conversation since they'd decided to fundamentally rebuild their friendship, and as much as Lily forgot in some moments – as much as she didn't feel any unease about sharing her inner thoughts with him, not when they were on the topic of something predating Hogwarts, something untainted by the wizarding world – there were also moments like this one, serving to remind her painfully of the fact that she didn't _know_ Severus the way that she'd thought she did, that there was a reason why they were in this uncertain position, and why she _needed_ to measure and guard all her words, instead of simply falling into old patterns of saying things with only her momentary emotions to guide them.

"You're probably right about what friendships are supposed to be like," he said after a protracted, uncomfortable silence in which Lily picked at the edge of her shirt and tried to think of something to say, "but if you risk getting hurt every time, then I think the Slytherin way is better."

" _Safer_ ," Lily corrected, "does not always mean better."

"Michael and Stacie don't think that relationships built on favours can't also be genuine," he pointed out defensively.

"But that's not... mutually exploiting one another isn't the same as granting each other favours."

"Isn't it?" he asked, raising his eyebrow as he pulled a greasy strand of hair away from his sweaty face. "If a relationship is based on favours given and taken, then wouldn't there be an expectation of it in any future interactions, too? How is that not exploitation?"

Lily licked her lips, then pursed them as she thought his words over, and Severus gave her the time she needed, dark, dark eyes alight with genuine, if mild, curiosity. She had no doubt that to him, it was the same thing, whichever wording was being used – that it came down to what the other person could do for you and vice versa.

"I suppose when you put it that way," she allowed. "But to me, favours are something you do without expecting anything in return, or at least not doing it knowing you'd be getting some form of payment, and it's something that you grant to others, or it's granted to you. Exploitation is, is about taking from the other person, and it even implies covert or manipulative actions towards them. I guess I feel that when it's about exploitation, there's no room for genuineness because the motive itself is insidious, whereas favours imply a degree of true emotion involved."

"Very gryffindor of you," was Severus' murmured comment, one that never failed to rankle her, because it always felt like an insult on his part, a condescending dismissal.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You think that being guided primarily by your expectation of gaining some benefit from the relationship cannot also mean you like the other person, and that one cannot wield favours as tools or even weapons, because one may not be hundred percent certain the effort will bear fruit. That's a very gryffindorish way of thinking; it's surface thinking, and no one in Slytherin would agree with you."

"Are you saying that for you, 'exploitation' bears no connotation of insidiousness at all?" she asked, tone just this edge of too combative. "Are you saying that if you were friends with someone for mutual exploitation, you'd not sacrifice your connection to them if you could get an enormous gain out of it, or that you don't imagine the other person might do that to you?"

"No, I'm not–" He frowned, shook his head, as if not quite understanding what she was saying. "Do you truly believe you'd never put your friendship with anyone in jeopardy if the potential benefit is enormous?"

"But that's not the point," she disagreed. "The point is that in a true, close friendship, this thought shouldn't even cross your mind, because you value the other person too much to risk them or your relationship with them, no matter the potential benefit."

"In a close friendship; but how many of those do you have? You're the social one of the two of us, you've certainly had much more chance of forming friendships of various degrees."

Lily opened her mouth, then closed it, feeling wrong-footed, and Severus smirked, clearly counting it as a point scored for his side of the debate.

"See? Most of any person's relationships are actually about personal benefit or gain, rather than any deep emotion. That's also what Michael and his friends thought, when I spoke with them; that these kinds of friendships are not the same as your kind of friendships, but that they're just as valid. And I think I agree with them."

"So where does that leave us?" she felt compelled to ask. "You said we were also mutually exploiting one another, didn't you? You gave me examples. Is our friendship–"

"No," he cut her off sharply, uncoiling from his position almost explosively as he reached for her hand. "No, Lily; you're my best friend. I'd _never_ willingly sacrifice our relationship for _anything_."

"I know; Severus, I know," she promised, squeezing his moist fingers back. Her heart fluttered at the fact that he'd reached out for her so swiftly, when it was usually she who had to initiate any and all physical contact between them. "And maybe you're right, and there are degrees of friendship, but I still say that there's a difference between favours and exploitation. Going out looking to meet people who fulfil your specific needs... that's not friendship, that's business. I agree that you can have superficial relationships that are by all definitions 'friendly', but to me, those aren't friendships in the true spirit of such a connection between two people."

"But you admit that friendships can also be primarily about the exchange of favours?" he challenged her.

Lily opened her mouth, words catching in her throat; exhaling, she shrugged. "I suppose the definition of the word 'genuine' to describe friendship needs rethinking."

He leaned back on his palms and extended his feet out, in a mirror position of her own from the beginning of their conversation, and Lily realised belatedly that their fingers were still touching. The sight made her smile.

"I still think friendships without exploitation or favours or anything else before genuine emotion are the more worthy kind, and it's the one I want us to have, even if they are riskier."

"Safer doesn't mean better," he parroted her words, inclining his head to offer a somewhat shy smile that made warmth unfurl in her chest. "I guess I see what you mean."

* * *

The Potters' guests arrived about ten days later, and the moment Athenora Adelmann walked into the foyer, James was pretty much blind to the two older women, because the girl was _stunning_. She had rich strawberry blonde hair set into an alluring peekaboo hairstyle, and her blue eyes were accentuated by elegantly applied kohl makeup. Her full lips were stained a dark burgundy bordering on purple that matched the colour of her robes, and James was willing to bet that she fit that Muggle beauty standard of 90-60-90 in proportions.

"Athenora, darling, this is my son James," Euphemia introduced them, gently patting the girl's hand.

"Lovely to meet you," the girl said, and James gave her his best winsome smile, reminding himself firmly not to do something stupid such as trip over his own feet. Her voice was pleasantly rich, and though her accent was distinctly American, he thought it suited her perfectly.

"The pleasure is all mine, Miss Adelmann."

"Athenora is fine, or Athens."

"Athens," he repeated, giving her a gracious bow over the hand he was holding gently with her own. He knew his mother would be ever so pleased that he was putting all those etiquette lessons to good use, but he made sure to exaggerate them just enough to draw an amused smile from the girl. "Would you like me to show you around the estate?"

"Actually, I heard from reliable sources that you own winged horses?"

"Yes, a couple of Aethonans and a Granian."

"Then I'd be far more interested in flying, rather than sightseeing."

James grinned; this was a girl after his own heart.

"Let me show you to your room so you can change, and we can go; it'll certainly be cooler up in the air than here on the ground."

"Yes, this heat is horrible," Athenora agreed as they walked away from the tittering middle-aged witches towards the guest section of the house. "Honestly, I was expecting much rainier weather, given how gloomy all movies happening on this side of the pond seem to be."

"Oh, this really isn't very normal at all; we're having an unusual heat wave this year. Are you asking for future reference?"

"Perhaps; I'll be taking over my father's company eventually, of course, though I've not yet decided where I'll continue my education in the meantime; I suppose I might even end up here if Mom moves."

"So you've finished school?" he asked, trying to judge her age without outright asking. In answer, Athenora laughed.

"Quite; I graduated from Ilvermorny this spring, which means I'm free to do as I want. I was actually thinking of travelling for a while, but that would depend on my potential travelling companions, and they've not yet made up their mind."

So she had to be at least eighteen, possibly nineteen. It was older than James' usual crowd, but it did promise something pretty new for the summer.

"Are they Muggle-borns? My experience is that most Pure-bloods wouldn't know about Muggle cinema."

"Some of them are, yes," she confirmed, lips tugging into a smirk. "But in my case, I've always been fascinated by the No-Maj world on its own merits, especially all the revolutionary things that are happening in the No-Maj States now."

"Really? Like what?"

"Free Love movement and Feminism, the Sexual Revolution, those kinds of social changes. They're far more dynamic in their social constructs than we are in ours, so it's a far more exciting world to live in than ours is."

James had never heard of any of that stuff, but the way she spoke of it made her sound like rather a progressive young woman, and he found himself not only attracted to her physically, but also thoroughly intrigued on an intellectual level, as well, a pretty rare thing in his experience.

"Speaking of the wizarding," he asked, trying to get the subject to a firmer ground; there'd be time to come back to the Muggle topics in the coming days and months, "what is your favourite kind of magic?"

"I have a special interest in wards; I've been debating on whether or not I should send a letter to the Hogwarts Headmaster and ask if I could perhaps study your school's wards for a semester or so. They are, after all, far older than Ilvermorny's, and my Geomancy professor suggested that I look into them as a possible focus for my further education. What about you, Jimmy? I can call you Jimmy?"

"Yes, of course," James flashed her a smile. "I'm partial to transfiguration magic, myself, though I don't see myself pursuing it to mastery level. Of course, I have two more years of schooling before then, but I'm far more interested in more exciting professions."

"Such as being an Auror?" she asked, perceptively enough that James was momentarily quite impressed.

"Well, with the political situation as it is..."

"Yes, Mom and Gerald have been going back and forth for months on whether they should stay here or in Boston; I can't say that the situation here is looking very bright for the immediate future."

"You can say that again," he agreed, opening the door to the guest suite his mother had assigned for their guests. "I'll meet you in the back garden in half an hour, then? Is that enough time?"

"Oh, plenty; I only need fifteen minutes to dig up my riding clothes and change."

"Fifteen minutes it is," James agreed, saluting a bit dramatically as the girl entered her rooms. Then, spinning on his heels, he strutted back to his own room to change, his mind momentarily filled with intense blue eyes and gorgeous, darkly-coloured lips.

* * *

Thursday morning after breakfast, Petunia approached Lily with crossed arms and a raised eyebrow, and exasperatedly said: "Well, are you going to go through the latest catalogues with me or not?"

Grinning, Lily hurried after her sister, making sure that Petunia's back was fully turned to her before she indulged herself in rolling her eyes at her sister's ridiculous incapability of being genuinely nice to Lily, even when it was obvious she wanted to be. At least she _was_ keeping to her word – in the last few days, Petunia had, while clearly keeping to her current habit of taciturn behaviour towards everyone in the house, nonetheless toned down those incendiary comments directed at Lily's schooling. Lily's thoughts were that this must have been a consequence of her curiosity, if not her belief, that Lily was as uninterested in speaking about Hogwarts as Petunia was, and it was clear from it that for once, her elder sister was willing to see beyond her own petty grievances, because she'd gradually shifted her conversation just enough that she was actually assisting Lily in evading the subject, which in turn led to the calming of hostilities between the two of them, though it meant that the topics of conversation with their parents were surprisingly starting to run out, at least when they were all together – Lily and her father were capable of talking for hours on end about academic matters of all kinds, and that, at least, was still comfortingly familiar and safe.

Well, between cordial relations with Petunia and not being able to speak about much with her parents during family time, Lily found it very easy to choose Petunia, and decided not to worry about it overmuch. She'd catch her dad in his study over the weekend and spend a few hours talking to him about politics and history, extremely useful for her in light of that conversation she'd had with the seventh-years that had made her realise she was rather uneducated on the basics of these topics, and on top of that the bonding activity that was only ever for her and her father. In the meantime, she decided to thoroughly enjoy herself on the shopping trip tomorrow, and told herself sternly that she was to let Petunia lead in this, at least insofar as which clothing stores to visit and what was or wasn't in style of the things Lily found that she liked for herself.

Walking into Petunia's room after her, Lily dropped herself on the bed, letting the older girl rummage through her desk and pull out catalogues and magazines to dump on Lily's lap. When she was done, Petunia settled the fan so that it was blowing in both their faces – and wasn't that breeze a bloody relief – and seated herself primly next to Lily so that she could begin flipping the pages, pointing to clothing articles and bossily explaining the latest trends.

Lily didn't consider herself unfashionable – she quite liked nice blouses and dresses and robes – but she felt utterly out of her depth with this: peasant look and Moroccan style and crop tops (which horrified Lily and disgusted Petunia) and kimonos and high-waisted jeans and gauchos (those Lily actually liked quite a bit) and platform shoes and _tee-shirts_ (which were apparently not considered underwear any more, but were glittery and printed and altogether beyond practical in Lily's opinion, making her bemoan not having figured this out sooner) and bloody _jumpsuits_ of all things.

"This has been the fashion for years, Lily," Petunia said with a roll of her eyes when Lily expressed her surprise, and suddenly, Lily felt hot shame flash through her, burning her cheeks. Had she been _so_ out of touch with the Muggle world that she'd had no clue about all of this?

The truth was, she rarely wore much Muggle clothing at all – only when she was at home and couldn't wear her robes. Her casual and fancy wizarding wardrobes both were on point with the current styles and trends, and she wore them as often as possible – whenever school robes weren't obligatory, which was in the evenings during the work week and on weekends – but there were very few items of Muggle clothing that carried over. Lily had drawn the line at wearing wizarding underwear, because it was frankly ridiculously outdated in every way, but beyond her brassieres and panties and stockings, she rarely needed much else, and certainly not tight pants and tube tops. Even shoes – she had gotten so used to the low-cut leather boots that were so widespread in the Wizarding world, that she'd not gotten a new pair of sneakers since her foot had stopped exponentially growing two years or so back.

She'd gone shopping for Muggle clothing in the last years, of course; her body had changed shape between the ages of thirteen and sixteen far too much for her to be able to continue wearing her old things. But it had been perfunctory shopping at best – going into stores and finding cheap yet nice-looking classical blouses and pants that she'd worn for years, knowing that it was mostly a waste of money to buy higher-end products simply because she was going to outgrow them by the time she next got a chance to wear them. She'd taken her favourite pieces with her to Hogwarts, and worn them when she felt too bothered by the swishy fabric around her feet – and because sometimes the thing she was most desperate for were her comfortable, ratty house clothes and the freedom of sitting with her legs akimbo without worrying if someone might see her underwear – but she'd never really given a single thought to the fashion trends of the Muggle world – just like she'd stopped giving much thought to the Muggle world in general.

So the answer was yes. Yes, she was just _that_ much out of touch with the Muggle world.

But, as much as it shamed her to realise it, there was one good thing in it – Petunia seemed to be quite on top of things, at least fashion-wise, and probably in a lot of other ways as well. It presented an excellent avenue for Lily to continue chipping away at her resentment and re-establish some good connections between them, however superficial (because in light of what was going on politically in the wizarding world, fashion did seem superficial, and Lily being sixteen years old and enjoying fashionable clothes didn't seem to make any difference in her opinion of it).

"I think I want a one-piece and a bikini both," Lily told Petunia when they finally reached the bathing suits pictures.

"A bikini?" Petunia repeated, wrinkling her nose as she looked sideways at the younger girl.

"Don't make that face, bikinis are in, and you'd be quick enough to choose it over a wizarding bathing suit, trust me."

Petunia blinked. "Really?" She tried to do bored, but Lily saw through her – she was absolutely curious. "What are they like?"

"Remember that picture of grandmother Ophelia we found when we were cleaning out her attic right after she died? With the frilly sleeves?"

"No!" Petunia gasped, horrified.

Lily nodded emphatically. "Yeah, _those_."

"It's the _nineteen-seventies_ , for God's sake, not the nineteen-hundreds! Don't wizards to anything _modern_?! Writing with quills and parchment, ridiculous-looking clothes, and _turn of the century bathing suits_!"

"You know, it's not even that bad for women as it is for men – they have to wear the full-piece suits, too!"

" _No_!"

"Yeah! I swear, I am absolutely getting Severus normal swim trunks _just_ for kicks, because I daren't even think of what he's got _now_."

Petunia snorted. "If he even _has_ any swim clothes."

Though it was meant snidely, Lily chose to interpret it as an agreement. "He probably hasn't, at that. He used to have one of those, though, when we were children – remember?"

Petunia released a very un-lady-like snort and nodded her head.

"How could I have forgotten?" Then she gasped, as the dots connected. "Oh, God, is _that_ why he wore that thing?!"

"What did you think?"

"That his mother was weirdly obsessed with sun protection."

Lily shrugged. "Well, I'm sure there was that, too; for someone with such dark hair, he's got surprisingly light skin. He burns almost as much as you and I do. I really have got to get him out more; maybe go swimming, if there's any bodies of water left by the time I manage to convince him of it. "

Petunia narrowed her eyes and hummed discouragingly.

"You're ignoring what he's done to you, then?"

Sighing, Lily tugged on the front of her damp shirt to unstick it from her skin. She remembered, surprisingly vividly, that letter she'd sent to Petunia a few months back, about the darkening political situation and the hatred and intolerance that she was faced with as a Muggle-born in the Wizarding world. She'd written so much about the word 'Mudblood' in it, that she was not the least bit surprised that her sister had almost intuitively grasped just how much that word had hurt her, coming out of Severus' mouth in front of half of the school while she was trying to protect him.

But to explain to Petunia everything else... no, that was impossible.

"I didn't, Petunia. I'm not... it's complicated. The situation itself, the, the events behind it, our relationship... it's too big for me to just draw a line and not consider anything but my own hurt. I can't, and I don't want to. But it's going to be different this time; our friendship isn't what it used to be, and maybe that's actually a good thing. Lord knows we've buried so much, ignored so much, been dishonest with each other so much."

"Like his obsession with you, as an example?"

"It's not... I'm not a foolish twelve-year-old, Tuney, that I don't understand what you and Mary and Clo mean when you constantly bring that up, but it's not _like_ that, okay? Whatever his feelings for me are, they're genuine, and he's never made me uncomfortable with his actions in the way that you constantly imply. He's never even _said_ anything about it, and I'm not going to put him down for, for _looking_ at me, for Merlin's sake! If I did, I'd have to put down Potter and Browning and a dozen other blokes who are, frankly, far more inappropriate than Severus. At least he's not lecherous about it, and trust me, I know how _that_ feels."

"You'd know," Petunia muttered, before raising her voice. "And what's to stop him from hurting you again?"

"Nothing, probably," Lily answered with a shrug. "But that's the point of trusting people, Petunia; it's a risk, and I've decided that Severus is worth the risk," she added pointedly, not exactly wanting to say 'our situation isn't any different on that front', but wanting Petunia to make the connection nonetheless.

"All right, but don't come crying to me when he hurts you again," her sister answered, lifting her nose in the air as if Lily had insulted her.

"Wasn't planning on it."

"Good."

The awkward silence stretched between them for several long moments, as they both stewed in the unpleasant thoughts the exchange brought up.

"Look, can we agree to disagree on this?" Lily asked in the end.

"It's your life, Lily. You get to live it however you want."

"I do appreciate your concern, Tuney, and not agreeing with you does not mean that I'm summarily dismissing you. But this is something that is too important to me to do as you'd want me to. _He_ is too important to me, whether you like it or not."

Petunia eyed her in a critical, closed-off sort of way, before finally nodding once, and pointedly returning them to the subject of fashion. Lily let it go, finding herself genuinely pleased with how the exchanged had ended up going, because the topic of Severus was a sticky one between them, and it meant a lot to her, that Petunia could hold herself from expressing her dislike of Lily's best friend to the point where it felt like condemnation of Lily for even _having_ him as a friend, especially after she'd so stupidly blurted out about the incident by the lake.

It did seem that Petunia too wanted them to improve their relations, at least to the point of being easily cordial with each other. That meant Lily's work was already cut in half, because as big of an uphill battle as it promised to be, it would still be nothing to the Sisyphean task of trying to win an unwilling Petunia over. But, as Lily was starting to understand, none of the best things in life ever came easy, and the red-haired witch was no slouch; she would do what needed to be done to earn them.

* * *

 _Dear Remus,_

 _I hope you_ _'_ _re doing better than you were right before the hols. I_ _'_ _m sorry I didn_ _'_ _t come visit you at the hospital wing, and that I haven_ _'_ _t written until now. Home has been very busy_ _–_ _my aunt had a car accident_ _–_ _so I_ _'_ _ve only now found some time to go to the owl post in Diagon Alley._

 _I imagine you_ _'_ _re still upset with us, but when we get back to school, I_ _'_ _ll still do my best to help you during that time of the month. I would come and help you out over the summer, too, if I could. Please let me know how you are as soon as you feel up to writing after the 11th._

 _I wish we could remain friends when school picks up again._

 _Peter_


	22. Ch II,19: To Face Misapprehensions

**Chapter 19: To Address Misapprehensions**

"Do you think we can go to your place tomorrow?" Lily asked as she and Severus sat under their tree, a small cooler filled with ice and chilled soda cans and water bottles between them. Severus had finally caved to the unrelenting, intolerable heat and rolled up his sleeves and trouser legs as much as he could, though that was the most he could will himself to do, embarrassed by his own skinny chest and long, bony toes. Lily, though, seemed to have little compunction about revealing skin, because today she was dressed in a loose light blue, patterned one-piece clothes thing he didn't know the name of with spaghetti-straps and very short shorts that made her legs look like they went on for miles, her beloved wide-brimmed hat on her head, green eyes hidden behind a new pair of sunglasses that made him nervous because his eyes kept straying back to her skin, her exposed legs in platformed sandals, her bared arms, her breasts outlined by the sweat-soaked blue fabric, and without knowing where her eyes were, he could never be sure that he wasn't going to be caught doing it.

All his clothes-related concessions to the heat weren't helping in the least, either, to his eternal exasperation; a few days before, the weatherman had proclaimed the day the hottest on UK record, with up to thirty-six degrees Celsius in some parts of the country. There was no rain in sight, and from what Severus caught of the news, the country was slowly starting to panic over this, because by now, most of the reservoirs were on their last puddles. Their little river was all but dried up, and was likely to be in another couple of weeks if this continued.

"No," he replied exhaustedly, wiping the sweat dripping down his face with his shoulder, even if it only helped to stop the itching caused by the droplets sliding down his cheek – his shirt was pretty much soaked through, after sitting outside for an hour.

"Not even in the morning?"

"Lily..."

"I _miss magic_ ," she whined. "I haven't slept through the night in a _week_. Do you know how hard it is to set the fan so that it's cooling me down but not blowing directly into my face the whole night? And Mum's already starting to talk about the power bill, not to mention how we have to save up water. We can use magic at your house, Sev."

" _No_ ," he hissed, shaking his head. "No, no magic where they might catch it."

"When they're out. Come on, you can't tell me your mother _never_ leaves the house," she wheedled. "I know you're coming up with all sorts of spells."

"That's my risk; I am _not_ risking you too," he told her firmly, enough that she almost immediately seemed to subdue.

"Fine," she murmured, pressing a chilled can to her reddened forehead and cheeks, "but then next time we're meeting in my room, because I can't stand the heat anymore out here."

"All right," he agreed, words almost tripping over each other to get out. He couldn't stand the heat, either, but meeting up with Lily was worth more than his own discomfort. At least she'd thought to finally suggest it; Severus hadn't dared raise the subject, unsure if he was still welcome in the Evans' home after everything that had happened between him and Lily.

"What spells are you working on nowadays?" his best friend asked, dropping back onto the wilting, yellowing grass and rolling the can down the side of her throat and over her clavicle. Severus' eyes remained riveted to the sight of it, the way it slipped over the curve of her neck, and his mouth went dry when she rested it above the neckline of her breezy, skin-sticking top, and _Merlin_ , but she looked stunning, pale skin and fit body, long legs and pert breasts that he suddenly wanted to touch and lick and nuzzle above all else, and swallowing, Severus shut his eyes tightly, desperately trying to will the sudden tightness in his trousers _away_ , mortified to even imagine Lily realising what had happened. Instead, he turned his head away and stared into the distance, barely aware of the sight of the nearly-dry riverbed as the enticing image of Lily's pale, glistening skin swam in his mind.

He was never quite sure what to do in moments like these, when all other emotions he felt for her were eclipsed by undiluted carnal lust, when his stupid hormones reminded him that he was sixteen years old and had never even kissed a girl in his life. He was used to feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders, used to feeling the quiet, unending yearning for the girl beside him; feeling like any other teenaged boy confronted with a _very_ hot girl? That was another thing entirely.

And this thrice-damned heat wasn't helping in the _least_. He'd wanked more in the last ten days than he had in the whole last _year_ , it felt like, and he didn't see this pattern changing any time soon, not if she continued to _do_ things like with that soda can or, Merlin help him, _ice cubes_.

"Severus?"

He actually startled and knew his cheeks would have heated up, if they weren't already flushed from the heat.

"Hm?"

"Are you working on any spells? Or something for Dumbledore?"

"Oh. Er... not for Dumbledore; mostly Occlumency practice, really. I can't exchange owl post here, so I am not expecting any correspondence from the Slytherins."

"But you're working on getting in with the Death Eaters?" she asked softly, turning her head to look at him under the brim of her hat, her ponytail splayed out around her head like a setting sun. When he didn't respond, she pushed herself back up, tossing the can back into the cooler in the process. "Sev, I know we've not talked about this much, and if you have to keep things from me, I understand. I mean, I don't know how this whole thing works, but I assume I can't be privy to much of it, so much as I'd like to be. But I'm not... I understand. I'm not fine with it, I _hate_ those people, but I promise I'll do my utmost to always remember that you're doing what you must, for the right reasons."

Severus wondered, privately, if their idea of the right reasons overlapped even a little bit. His spine crawled at the thought of finally delving into this with her; Lily had spent so much time expressing her hatred and disgust with that crowd, with Severus' association with them, that it was almost instinctive by now to raise his guard, to expect her stinging rebuke and blistering disapproval.

But she was trying. Looking at her, he could see it on her face, that she had resolved herself to being there for him, and the truth was, Severus wanted to share this with her, wanted her to understand better, wanted her to see that he was doing what she'd consider the right thing, that he was trying to change on this, that he wasn't going to let it come between them again. So he spoke.

"Wilkes is taking over from Rosier in September, and I'm in with those two. We had a sit-down, right before the hols."

"What... what will that entail? And what about Avery and the rest?"

Severus sighed, licking his lips in indecision. "For now, probably little things. They'll want to find out where my strengths are. Rosier will insist on being the one to take credit for my _discovery_ ," he sneered the word, "when the time comes."

"Time for what?" she asked sharply, pulling her sunglasses off her head and sticking them on top of her hat brim.

"To meet the Dark Lord," he replied quietly. "Not for a while yet; they don't dare recruit anyone below the age of majority whose parents cannot give consent."

"Consent for what? Severus, that sounds–"

"It's called the Dark Mark; it's a direct connection to the Dark Lord, reserved for his closest. Avery's gotten one this spring, which means he's a full-fledged Death Eater. I'm certain Rosier has it, though I don't know about Wilkes, he's not from one of the prominent families."

"I thought those were just stories made up by the conspiracy nuts," she said, voice raspy and dry. Severus studied her face for a moment, trying to read her emotions from it. Horror was the most prominent one, but there was fear there, too.

He shook his head. "No, it's real. It's... the biggest honour the Dark Lord can bestow on the recruits. It means you're one of them."

"And you..." she choked on the word, swallowing, and reached, almost compulsively, for his bare forearm. Her fingers felt like electricity on his skin, even in spite of the heavy topic. "Are you going to take it?"

"I don't know," he answered, the lie coming out instinctively. "I've not spoken with Dumbledore about any of it yet."

She nodded, swallowing, then scooted closer and rested her head on his shoulder, linking her arm through his elbow. Severus felt galvanized from the contact, her skin like a furnace, adding to his already overheated body until he felt almost like hyperventilating and his cheeks felt on fire. Merlin, he wanted to wrap his arm around her, wanted to twist the red strands of her ponytail around his fingers, wanted to taste the drop of sweat that was sliding down her arm to pool on the inside of her elbow.

What he did do was push those thoughts away as firmly as he could, and instead desperately grasped for something to make her move away, because as exquisite as it was, the torture of having her resting against him, it was too fucking hot, she looked desperately enticing, and he could not survive the humiliation of her catching on to his growing erection.

"I'm working on a spell. A defensive spell that could be quite destructive."

In hindsight, that was perhaps not the smartest thing to say, though it did do the purpose. Lily moved away almost immediately, leaving Severus feeling at the same time utterly disappointed and gratefully relieved.

"Dark Magic?"

"Yes," he confirmed, forcing himself to straighten his spine and look her in the eyes. "It's for enemies only, but yes, it is Dark Magic."

The frown on her face deepened, and she opened her mouth, to berate him no doubt, and he already started to prepare himself for a battle he wasn't sure he could afford to lose.

"Are you being careful?"

That brought him up short.

"What?"

"Dark Magic corrupts, Severus. If you're tinkering with it and you don't know what you're doing–"

"I know what I'm doing, Lily," he protested, "I've _been_ studying Dark Magic for years."

" _By yourself_ ," she emphasized. "It's dangerous, and you're self-taught, or are you going to tell me that your mother showed you anything but where the books are stored?"

"Technically, she didn't show me even that much," he muttered, rolling his eyes. "I know what I'm doing."

"Why can't you for one second take my concern seriously?" she exclaimed, sounding waspish and plenty ticked-off, and Severus instantly felt his heart picking up a frantic, frightened staccato rhythm. "You won't give it up, and now that you're working with Dumbledore, you _can_ _'_ _t_ , either, and I'm trying to deal with that, but you're acting like I'm this naïve, idiotic nag who doesn't know the first thing about what Dark Magic even _is_!"

"No, Lily, that's not–"

"Well, what else is it, then? Because you keep putting me down for asking you to _be careful_ , for Christ's sake, as if my worry isn't worth the dirt under your fingernails!"

"I _am_ careful, Lily. I'm _always_ careful when I'm studying Dark Magic. And I'm – I'm sorry, ok, I didn't mean it like that – you worrying is the furthest thing from worthless – I'd _never_ think it – I just..."

"Just what?"

"I just keep expecting us to dissolve into our old arguments," he admitted, biting his lip as his eyes wandered down to where he'd picked at the skin of his thumb until he'd made a hangnail, before looking back up at her. Her green eyes were sad when he met them. "Lily, I am not going to stop studying the Dark Arts. I don't have much choice in the matter either way, but... but if I did – I _like_ the Dark Arts, the theory behind the magic, the, the complexity of it, how it differs from everyday magic. There is far more to them than what you've been indoctrinated into believing by your House. I'm _not_ going to change my mind about working for the Light, and I'm _not_ going to turn into a Death Eater because I like them, I _promise_ , but I don't want to be wary of every single conversation we have about this anymore. Please, please understand."

She released a shuddering exhale, and nodded, breathing out a barely audible: "Ok." She rubbed her eyes for several long moments with her fingers, almost as if she was holding back tears, which tore at Severus' insides. "Ok. I'll..." She tugged at the delicate skin of her lip with her teeth, and then ran her finger over it, before scraping the tiny torn piece off her forefinger with her thumb into the grass. There was a tiny cut on her lip where she'd done it, a bead of blood welling slowly until she licked it away. Severus couldn't avert his eyes from it, and is mouth suddenly tasted of copper. "Do you have any theoretical books on the subject?"

His eyes flew up to meet hers. " _What?_ "

"Do you have any theoretical books on Dark Magic that you could lend me?"

He blinked in befuddlement, turning fully towards her. "You want to read my books on the Dark Arts?"

"Yes, Severus," she snapped, voice shaking just a little. "You say that I'm wrong about them, that there's more to it than what I know, then I want to understand. If this is, is a part of you, then I don't have a choice, do I?"

Merlin, she _was_ going to cry. A knot lodged in Severus' throat at the possibility, and he nodded.

"All right, I have one that's primarily about the theory. Lily, I'm sorry, I don't–"

"What are you to be sorry for?" she shot back, sniffing once lightly. "We're not going to argue about this anymore, are we?"

"You don't have to do anything you don't want to," he said softly, shaking his head. "It's all right if you feel–"

"Feel what? Feel incapable of handling Dark Magic? Feel like it makes my skin crawl?"

"Afraid," he responded, perhaps more candidly than either of them were really capable of handling.

"I am _not_ afraid!"

"You look like you're going to cry!"

She froze, before taking a deep breath and releasing it. "I'm not going to cry," she promised, voice thankfully far more steady than it was a few moments before. "And perhaps I am... apprehensive... about this. Dark Magic is, is... it taints. Is it so wrong that I might not want to get into that?"

"I'm not asking you to, Lily."

"You are; you just don't realise it," she countered. "Everything, this whole situation – did you think I'd just give you a half-hearted hug as a 'thank you' and then pretend like this thing, your position with Dumbledore, isn't happening? Even if the fight didn't matter to me, I'd still want to be there with you through it. And if I wasn't willing to do this for you, do you think our friendship would be any better than it was before? You'd keep secrets from me and I'd pretend that I understood what you were doing, and meanwhile you'd just continue obviously supporting those Slytherins and Voldemort, and I'd eventually forget whose side you were on, or I'd think that it was just another empty promise you made to me, and we'd just end up right were we started last month. No, Severus. You may not want to ask this of me, and I may not regret how things are – because I _don_ _'_ _t_ – but don't act like I have a choice in it, either."

And horrified, Severus finally fully understood what she meant, why she was insisting. In his mind's eye, that future she was painting felt so tangible, so real, that his stomach turned and bile burned his throat. He'd done it all for her, done it because he'd not wanted to lose her, and he'd thought – he remembered thinking it so clearly – that it would be worth nothing if she didn't meet him half-way, but he'd never, _ever_ considered that meeting him half-way would mean causing herself such anguish as this.

"I _never_ meant for you to–"

"I know. It doesn't matter, though, that's how it is, and I _want_ to do this, Severus; it's _important_ to me, do you understand? You and our friendship, I don't want to lose it, and so I'll do whatever is necessary, but sometimes I just can't... do it graciously, that's all. I need your help for this, so please don't... don't act like it doesn't matter, or like you can't deal with it."

Swallowing shakily, Severus nodded.

"All right. Just, remember that the Dark Arts theory isn't the same as actually performing Dark Magic. Most of it builds on general magical theory, and simply knowing and understanding how it works won't have particular special effects on you. Even most Dark Magic won't do nearly as much as everyone seems to think it might, not if you know how to do it properly."

"I'll try to see it that way," she promised with a determined nod. "And you're right; knowing about it is one thing, doing it is completely another. I think... I think that if this ends up being an actual war, then likely as not, my enemies will be using Dark Magic against me, and I'll need to understand their methods if I want to be able to counter them successfully."

"That's true," he agreed, exhaling in relief when the topic was dropped.

And, in spite of her obvious revulsion towards Dark Magic, a part of him was feeling uplifted, almost nervous, about her actually looking properly into it and passing judgment; for all that she'd been denigrating the Dark Arts since the first time he'd brought it up, Lily had never really had a well-informed opinion on the subject.

Perhaps, just perhaps, she'd actually find something useful in the book, and he'd be able to talk with her about it without fear of censure. The thought made him feel like he was ten years old again, bringing the book to show her for the first time in his life, hoping that his best friend would be as interested in it as he had been. It was a frightening feeling.

* * *

The full moon fell on Sunday the 11th of July, with the full illumination occurring a bit after two in the afternoon. Lily spent that evening and half of the night staring at the white orb in the cloudless sky, her eyes stinging from exhaustion, but the heat and the nervousness keeping her from sleep. She knew it was stupid to be nervous – after all, Remus had gone through nights such as this one twelve times a year for going on twelve years, and there was no reason to think this time would be any different – but she couldn't help herself, not when she so clearly remembered just how ravaged he'd looked after the last full moon, and how very hard he'd taken it that his former friends had not come to visit in the hospital wing.

She held out until eleven-thirty the next morning before finally giving into her own anxiety and dialling Remus' home number. In the last couple of weeks, she and Remus had talked about four or five times, though only that first time did she have a chance to speak with anyone other than Remus – both of his parents worked, and he was alone in their home for most of his days. It was something of a relief, therefore, to hear the soft, melodious voice of Hope Lupin on the other end after the sixth ring, because it meant that Remus' mother must not have gone into work today, and that Remus wasn't suffering the usual aftermaths of his curse alone.

" _Lupin residence._ "

"Hi, Mrs Lupin, it's Lily Evans."

" _Oh, hello, Lily. Calling to check on Remus?_ "

"How is he? Was it a very difficult night?"

" _Somewhat, but I think better than last time,_ " Remus' mother answered. " _Let me just check if he is awake, I think hearing your voice will do him good._ "

"Thank you." About two minutes later, she heard a clattering noise she took to be someone moving the phone into Remus' room. She exhaled in silent relief when his voice came on, a little shaky and exhausted, but certainly calm enough.

" _Hullo, Lily._ "

"Hey, Remus. I just wanted to check on you, see how the night had gone."

" _All right, I suppose,_ " he said with a tired little laugh. " _Nothing to write home about. How are you?_ "

"Too hot to sleep and too tired to think, but I'll survive," she answered with a light laugh. "Is it any cooler down there?"

" _Not one bit. Thankfully, our home is a registered wizarding residence, so at least my days are more pleasant than yours._ "

"Is that how it is?" she asked, exaggerating her outrage to a completely absurdly disproportionate size. "We're resorting to gloating now, are we?"

Remus' laugh sounded exhausted, but it was there, and that was exactly what Lily had been aiming for. " _Hey, I have a debilitating curse on me, I get to gloat that my life is better than yours in this one thing!_ "

"And now you're guilt-tripping me," she answered, making sure to convey in her voice just how hard she was rolling her eyes. "My, what a lovely friend you are."

" _Lily?_ " Remus suddenly sounded hesitant. " _You_ are _joking, aren_ _'_ _t you?_ "

"Yes, Remus, I'm teasing you," she told him. "Though now that we're on topic, I actually _am_ angry about this, just not with you."

" _With whom, then?_ "

"With the bloody Ministry for Magic and bloody Minchum! It's all fine and dandy for wizarding families who can just use _Aguamenti_ and never think about things like empty reservoirs and reusing water and having to carry buckets from bloody _standpipes_ , not to mention heat strokes and tolerating these insane temperatures, but no one ever thinks about Muggle-borns below the age of majority, whose families might _need_ help, which they can't provide, because they are limited with that _stupid_ no-magic-during-holidays rule that doesn't even apply to anyone living within a wizarding residence! And do you know how much talk has been of this in the Ministry? Exactly _zero_ , if we're to trust the _Prophet_. Zero, Remus! No one _cares_ , because the only people it affects in _any_ way are Muggle-borns!"

" _Been holding that in for a while?_ " he replied, amusement tinging his words.

"Have I! Merlin, you have no idea!" she exclaimed. "I am at the end of my tether with this _stupid_ heatwave, and now we have to ration water, too!" Sighing, she rubbed her aching eyes. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to gripe, I'm sure you're tired enough without my anger in the mix."

" _No, it_ _'_ _s... it_ _'_ _s nice,_ " Remus answered. " _Keeps my mind off of last night._ "

"Has anyone else written to you?"

" _You mean, have my former friends written to me?_ " he corrected with a sigh. " _No. Well, actually, Peter did two days ago, but I_ _'_ _m not holding my breath come September; you know as well as I that he_ _'_ _s a follower to his core, he_ _'_ _ll do what James and Sirius do, unless he can get away with them not knowing about it. Honestly, Lily, after everything, I_ _'_ _m not expecting anything from them. They_ _'_ _ve made themselves perfectly clear._ "

"I'm so sorry, Remus. God, they're _such_ wankers." The telephone handset felt very slippery and warm as her fingers clenched tightly around it, her fury on his behalf rising like a tide.

" _So you_ _'_ _ve said multiple times._ "

"Well, it's true. You're better off without them if they don't come around, and even if they do, you should put them through the wringer for this."

" _Can we talk about something else, please? I_ _'_ _m really not feeling up to this topic again._ "

"Yes, of course," Lily hurried said, cursing herself for an idiot. She was supposed to be _helping_ , not upsetting him. "I'm sorry, Remus. I didn't mean to upset you. I seem to be very good at that and not much else these days, really."

" _Please don_ _'_ _t say that, yeah? Your calls... they mean a lot, truly. It_ _'_ _s been a really lonely summer so far._ "

"You should come," she blurted out. Closing her eyes, she leaned her head against the wall.

" _Come visit you? Lily, you know that I_ _'_ _m not... well..._ "

"Not just for a day. I meant come over for a couple of weeks. I'm sure I could convince Mum and Dad to let you stay in the guest bedroom. We could go to Manchester or Birmingham, and there's a film theatre not too far away. I've been working on convincing Severus to go swimming with me for days now, I think he'll crack soon. Even his famed stubbornness can't stand against this heat."

" _Lily,_ " he chided, and she could almost hear him shaking his head in light exasperation. " _I think you are quite overestimating the tolerance that exists between me and Snape._ "

"The non-existent one, you mean?" she replied. "I'm aware how things really are, Remus. Even getting Severus to accept that we are friends has been a struggle, and I know you only tolerate me talking about him out of politeness. I'm not naïve. But... is it so bad that I'd want two of my best friends to find a way of not trying to tear each other's heads off every time they happen to meet because of me?"

" _No, Lily, of course not. It_ _'_ _s just..._ "

"Please? It'd mean a lot to me. And even if not, I'd still like you to come. I spend all of my time here with Severus normally and we've been doing pretty well as far as repairing our friendship goes, he'll be fine for a couple of weeks if you two really can't find a way to coexist. We'll have fun, I promise."

He sighed and stayed quiet, and Lily bit her lip to stop herself from filling that silence with more pleading. Finally, after what felt forever, he sighed again and answered: " _Yes, all right. I_ _'_ _ll see with Mum about it, and you have to ask your parents, too, but maybe end of the week? And no longer than the third of August, I_ _'_ _d prefer to spend the week before the next full moon at home_."

"Good, that also works for me, since I'm going to meet up with the girls for a couple of weeks at the seaside that Sunday, I think it's the first of the month."

" _Ok, then. I_ _'_ _ll call you tonight, to finalize it? And maybe you could look up the fastest way for me to get to yours, you_ _'_ _d more likely have the train schedules and such, right?_ "

"Leave it to me."

They rang off, and, putting the handset back into its cradle, Lily bit her lip as she tried to imagine how the next two weeks were likely to play out – she knew Remus would try, for her sake, to be civil if not friendly, and that Severus would be the tougher nut to crack. But, though the idea itself had been a spur-of-the-moment type of thing, she couldn't but be hopeful it might end up being a good one. Perhaps, away from Hogwarts and the constant antagonism inflamed by others, the two boys would actually manage to see in each other what she saw in both of them, and, if not, at the very least they might learn to coexist when necessary with some measure of peace.

And, if nothing else, she'd never had any of her Hogwarts friends visit over the summer, and she was quite looking forward to that. Remus was quiet and unobtrusive, and she couldn't imagine that even Petunia might find something to dislike him for, besides his general appearance (though, a dark part of Lily noted, that seemed to be more than enough for her sister anyway). And maybe, just maybe, having an outsider stay over would finally help sort out whatever strange thing was going on in the house, that she'd _still_ not managed to get to the bottom of.

She really hoped some movement _did_ happen on that front, even bad, because the tension was, slowly but surely, driving her crazy. _Anything_ was better than this unacknowledged, heavy air that had so far permeated her holidays, like the darkened, weighty atmosphere right before a strong summer storm – when it came, the rain washed all of it away, but the wait for it could be unbearable.

* * *

The Black family was the oldest wizarding family to claim for its ancestral seat a townhouse in inner London, rather than a stately house out in the countryside. Sirius was personally convinced that this was a load of bollocks, because even he, with his utter lack of interest in national history, knew that the upper class had not resided _in_ London if they could help it until the beginning of this century, and that townhouses had been used seasonally at best. Still, the only country house that the Black family claimed was the one in which his mother's parents resided together with her youngest brother Cygnus, and that was a small, unimpressive thing that had once belonged to an older and now extinct branch of the family and that had passed into Pollux and Irma Black's ownership around the time Sirius himself had been born – and having Narcissa Black marry out of that place was apparently out of the question, hence all the hubbub and commotion that Grimmauld Place was experiencing now.

Part of the problem with the whole wedding situation, Sirius knew, was the fact that Lucius Malfoy's mother was infirm. When Bellatrix's wedding had been organised five years ago, Rodolphus' mother had been heavily involved, and Grimmauld Place had served only as the gathering point for the bridal procession, nothing more; this time, organising anything at the Malfoy Manor was out of the question because the Malfoy matron needed peace and quiet, neither of which could be found either at or leading up to a wedding. But, given that Lucius Malfoy was the heir to a very old wizarding family, the ceremony itself by tradition needed to occur in a location tied in some way to the newlywed couple, so the plans at the moment were to have the actual ceremony at Grimmauld Place, attended only by the family of the bride, groom, and the heads of the Pure-blood families and their spouses (because there was no room for any more than that), with the reception for the eight hundred plus guests occurring at an estate specifically rented for this purpose just outside of London.

And so Sirius had ended up relegated with Regulus to writing up and sending out all the invitations – they were not allowed anywhere near the kitchen or the decorations, except for the day before the wedding, when they were going to end up being grunt labour, setting up all the heavy furniture. Walburga didn't trust the elves to do anything other than cooking and cleaning, and now that Narcissa's parents were over practically every day, Sirius was starting to lose his hearing.

"No, no, no! You cannot put those flower vases there, dear Walburga, the bouquets will be too large and block the light, and I will _not_ have my dear in unfavourable light!"

"Yes, your dear _must_ be in the _most_ favourable light indeed, given it's what recommends her best!"

"And what is _that_ supposed to mean?"

"Why, Druella darling, I am agreeing with you! Of course, your idea to put the flowers in the corners will serve excellently to completely discompose the room."

" _What_?! This is my daughter's _wedding_ , you miserable shrew! Who cares a fig about your furnishings!"

"Obviously you do not, because in your mind, it seems, the only thing a wedding truly needs to look nice is to have the bride in the _best_ light!"

"Whereas you do not care one _whit_ about your own niece's happiness, do you; oh, no, it's all about the excuse to invite half of wizarding Britain to this miserable, gloomy place because otherwise everyone has the good sense to avoid it like the plague!"

"You take that back, you envious little crone!"

" _What is all this racket, I say! Do you intentionally make it so that we men go deaf?!_ "

"Oh, shut up, you old codger, and be glad I'm letting you mulch off of us instead of kicking you out on your arse like my mother had done with her father-in-law!"

"I am the head of this family, and this is my house! If anyone will be kicking anyone out, it would be me kicking _you_!"

"Ha! You are the joke of this family, old man, and no matter what my husband has let you tell yourself, you will never be anything else! So keep your mouth shut, or I will shut it for you! You see what I have to deal with, Druella?"

"Yes; I must say, your parents are exemplary in comparison."

"Well, of course they are; they have always known their place in this family, unlike that sorry excuse for a cripple."

Sirius clapped his hands over his ears and banged his forehead softly against the wooden table, while Regulus next to him sighed softly.

"Merlin, they never stop, do they?" Sirius moaned. "And just when I think they'll finally do something interesting and permanent like tear each other's hair out, Grandfather has to butt his nose in and make them agree on something."

"Perhaps he's shrewder than we give him credit for," Regulus mused. "I am personally dreading the day they can't get over their issues, and this whole thing explodes in the family's collective face."

"At least that'd be fun to watch."

"Cissy would be devastated, you know."

Sirius raised his head up and grinned ferally. "Schadenfreude, Reggie, you gotta learn to enjoy the schadenfreude."

"I didn't even know you knew the word."

"Because you think I'm an idiot."

Regulus only sighed again and shook his head and, ill-tempered, Sirius accepted the invitation from his hand, reaching over for a gaudily decorated envelope to stuff it in. Given Sirius' chicken-scratch, as Walburga always called his handwriting, Regulus was the one tasked with doing the actual writing – they had several copying quills, so writing out an invitation template per quill had been enough, but they still had a long list of names to go through, and those needed to be filled out individually. Regulus was keeping a hawkish eye on Sirius, knowing well enough that the temptation to meddle and cause mischief was nigh-on irresistible, but the younger brother didn't know all the tricks the older brother had up his sleeve – if a few invitations were to mysteriously get lost on their way to their intended recipients, and others still be sent to the wrong people, well, they really were inviting half of wizarding Britain to this thing, so who was even going to notice until it was too late.

Sirius was under no illusion that this wouldn't earn him a painful punishment of some kind; if he'd ever had any false perceptions of his family life, he would have been thoroughly stripped of them the first Christmas he'd spent with James' family and seen how a loving family was supposed to behave. But punishment was something that he got for both real and imagined infarctions, so if that was the case, he was going to do his utmost to actually earn them, because at least then, he had the satisfaction of watching his mother blow her top off for an actual reason familiar to him – and the control of the situation, at least to a certain extent.

So he cast a few weak Confundus Charms at the quills, just to make them have bizarre spelling errors or even use malapropisms here and there, and employed his sleight-of-hand skills to swipe a few letters out of the growing pile without his brother noticing, so that once he was alone in his room, he could painstakingly imitate Regulus' handwriting and fill in some of the names – firstly and foremostly, those of the disowned family members, starting with Narcissa's own sister, Andromeda.

The Black family was actually quite large, when all the branches were taken into account. Sirius' great-grandfather and namesake had been the eldest of five children, and that was only accounting for three generations back. To be fair, most of their children had been girls, which had only tied the Black family to other Pure-blood houses, rather than giving rise to side branches, but the family was old enough to have several whole branches disowned for the perceived faults of one of the ancestors, and there were at least three disowned Blacks still living that Sirius could think of, who'd find great enjoyment in vexing everyone and possibly causing some small spoils to the wedding itself. Oh, they wouldn't show their face at a family gathering, none of them were interested in more humiliation, and ultimately Sirius didn't _actually_ want to wreck Narcissa's wedding – no matter how much they disliked each other, Sirius counted Cissy on the good side of the family, and besides, he wasn't _that_ petty, to cause her distress when his real target was his own mother – but Sirius could see his cousin Dromeda sending some very noticeable flowers with a congratulatory and thank-you-for-the-invite note (and knowing her, she'd probably end up sending a bouquet of her younger sister's favourite flowers, too, though he had no clue how that would be received after the whole Ted Tonks debacle), and watching Walburga's face change shades while she had to acknowledge the flowers (or whatever else any of the people she detested might send their way) in the middle of a crowd was going to be the highlight of Sirius' summer.

Cygnus, Druella and Narcissa were almost daily installations at their dinner table these days. Cygnus was Walburga's brother, the youngest grandchild to the youngest of Phineas Nigellus' children, with no male heirs, which effectively meant he was the last person in line to inherit anything within the family, and Orion never let him forget it, either. Cygnus' choice of coping mechanism was firewhiskey, and he made sure to play favourites wherever he went – which was uncomfortably often Grimmauld Place even without the wedding of his daughter as a convenient excuse, most likely to simply be underfoot and otherwise find little ways of annoying his sister and brother-in-law. His wife Druella, née Rosier, was in general a rather mellow woman, except when she had to deal with Walburga, in which case she was as nasty as any Black-by-blood. Narcissa was their youngest daughter, and if Sirius was to say anything of her, it was that she was the snooty little princess completely befitting that position in the family. Regulus got on with her quite well, but she barely gave Sirius a glance if she could help it, and the elder Black brother found himself preferring it that way, too.

Having them in the house as often as was the case this summer had served mainly to produce more tension than even Regulus was comfortable with, never mind Sirius – annoyed Walburga was a Walburga that was a danger to Sirius' health, and even worse, Orion seemed to be tiring of his in-laws' squabbles far faster than had been the case in the past, which meant that he more and more often brought the brunt of his personality and position in the family to bear on everyone, including his sons, which caused Sirius far more mental stress than he could easily handle. It meant that Orion's patience in the lessons Sirius and Regulus were having with him was short, and Sirius dreaded every inevitable mistake he was no doubt going to make during those afternoons, because Orion's way of punishment consisted of a voice pitched low and icy, along with cultured, refined insults that belittled in just those ways that rang of truth – he often accused Sirius of being incompetent and stupid for not having a good grasp of economics, investment policies and money handling; he called Sirius out on his lack of interest in the family and made him feel guilty for it, even though Sirius had rarely gotten anything good from the family, and even that had been from his maternal uncle Alphard, his paternal aunt Lucretia or his brother Regulus, but only once in a blue moon from Orion and _never_ from Walburga; worst of all, he compared Sirius to Arcturus, which, knowing how much Orion considered his own father to be a disgrace, an embarrassment and an unfortunate but unavoidable burden and blight on the family, always cut the deepest.

Those sessions left Sirius feeling worthless, bruised inside and shaky, left him questioning if he was good at anything at all in the world, if there was any point to trying even this hard (which, admittedly, wasn't nearly hard enough, a subconscious choice of rebellion that hurt Sirius himself most of all, yet the only way to deal with the situation that wasn't acting like Regulus). And in those days, if and when Walburga got a hold of him for some little, insignificant thing or another, Sirius found himself curling up under his own bed and clawing for some strength to curse the hot tears that wet the carpet, because it was so easy to think 'fuck them' when he was away from this prison, this hellhole of a place and this disaster of a family, but they stripped him of that ease with nothing but cruel words and little hexes, until he wanted nothing else but to get away from it all, even if it meant doing something permanent and stupid to himself.

One thought kept him going (some days, the only thing keeping him going, in fact) – that this was his last summer at home; he was turning seventeen in November, and then he was going to be able to walk away from this life once and for all, without a fear of being forcibly dragged back into it due to a technicality. When he'd been a child, Sirius had been terrified of having his name and likeness burned off the tapestry, of being pushed into the world with nothing but the clothes on his back, of being rejected so utterly that even his last name would be something he'd have to forcibly wrench from the family's grasp just to keep for himself. He remembered dreams of it, so vividly etched in his mind for the utter feeling of terror and despair that accompanied them; he still had them, only now they were accompanied by the feeling of freedom and lightness. He felt so cornered that something which had terrified him now smelled so appealing his mouth watered at the thought.

Sirius lived for that day – 3rd of November, four months. It was the day of his freedom, and he was going to reach it. Everything else? It was the price to pay, to be himself fully for the first time in his life.

* * *

It wasn't hard for Remus to find Lily at the little bus station once he disembarked the bus from Manchester; not that there were many people there, but even if there had been, he'd have been able to distinguish her smell – it made him realise he'd missed the unique combination of her natural body scent overlaid with the usual light white floral perfume she preferred. She was standing with a middle-aged gentleman by her side, whose hair had gone mostly grey, though his elegantly trimmed beard was still quite ginger in the sun. Studying them, it wasn't hard to notice the similarities and conclude that the man had to be Professor Stephen Evans, her father, as they had the same pert nose and lower face. The man was wearing light summer trousers and a simple white button-down with his sleeves rolled up, while Lily had on a breezy summer dress with white shorts underneath, and Remus found himself embarrassed with the momentary ditch his brain went to when he saw the expanse of toned skin. He'd never seen her dressed so revealingly, and his own autonomously-functioning body parts were taking notice, to his utter shame.

"Remus!" she exclaimed, waving enthusiastically and grinning at him from under her wide-brimmed summer hat. He bee-lined for her, shuffling his duffle bag into a more comfortable position on his shoulder, and accepted her hug with as much dignity and as little physical contact as he could muster. He really didn't want her to figure out his little problem by exacerbating it through the press of her breasts to his chest. "Did you have a good trip?"

"Good enough; your idea about using the public Floo in Manchester to cut the route down most of the way was inspired," he admitted with a smile. "Professor Evans," he greeted the man, extending his hand.

"Stephen is fine, son, or Mr Evans if you insist. 'Professor' feels pretentious in my own home."

Lily sniggered and shook her head. "Daddy, this is Remus Lupin, we're both in Gryffindor together. Remus, I told him and Mum you're half-n-half, just so you know. Daddy was worried about exposure."

"My mum keeps us all on top of Muggle customs," Remus confirmed as they began walking to the car. "Thank you for letting me stay in your home, sir."

"So long as you know to keep out of my girls' rooms at night..."

Remus felt himself blush beet red, while Lily exclaimed 'Dad!' and smacked her father, rather hard by the sound of it, on the arm, prompting the older man to chuckle.

"You know it needed to be said."

"We're not _like_ that, Dad! Remus is just a friend, I've told you this a _million_ times already." Shaking her head, she turned to Remus. "I'm sorry. Mum's been on and on about how you're my secret boyfriend, so brace yourself to field uncomfortable questions. She can get carried away when she gets a bug in her ear."

"Like Severus is your friend?"

" _Yes_ , like Severus is my friend," Lily confirmed, rolling her eyes in annoyance. "And I resent your implication!"

"No, hon, you _resemble_ the implication – or are you going to deny the number of times you've smuggled that boy into your room through the window? You know, I've been thinking of cutting down that tree for years now."

"Oh, har har. My dad likes to pretend himself a comedian, Remus. Ignore him."

Mr Evans chuckled. "And Lily here is always the best entertainment when she's riled up."

Remus smiled. "It's a new side to her for me, sir; the last time someone riled her up, they ended up vomiting slugs and sneezing bats."

" _Those wankers deserved it_ ," Lily shot back irately, even as her father turned to her with a frown. "They were bullying Severus and had the gall to flirt with me while I was defending him. They were lucky I'm a prefect and am expected to set a good example for the rest of the school."

"Your mother dislikes you swearing, daughter mine."

 _That_ was what her father had focused on? Remus blinked, realigning his initial assumptions about what Lily's parents must be like. Given what little Lily had told him of them in the last week while they were planning his visit, he'd expected a stern-faced, severe man and a slightly overbearing though genuine housewife. Clearly, his stereotypes needed reconsidering.

The whole thing became only that much more confusing when they arrived at Lily's lovely two-storey home and the immediate mood almost flipped inside out. Lily and Mr Evans had been joking around and teasing each other all the way from the bus station, but as soon as they were in the house, Mr Evans disappeared into his study, and Remus was confronted with a scowling, horse-faced girl about their own age, who made a point of looking him up and down with a disdainful look in her eyes.

"So, this is him, then? Your friend?"

Lily sighed. "Yes, Petunia, this is Remus. Remus, my sister Petunia."

"Nice to meet you," Remus said neutrally to the older girl, who sniffed.

"I still don't see why you had to invite him now of all times," she muttered.

"Well, how was I supposed to know they'd start shutting off the water supply?" Lily shot back, rolling her eyes. "Remus is stronger than he looks, and if you ask him nicely enough, he might just be willing to help you carry your share of the water buckets from the standpipe."

"Hmph," Petunia sniffed, but seemed to relax her posture, and Remus met Lily's pleading eyes. It wasn't exactly what he'd signed up for, but if it bought him enough good will from Lily's sister to have a pleasant two weeks, then he didn't mind a bit of lugging things around. Where he'd heard very little of Lily's parents from her, he'd heard plenty about Petunia, and was prepared for hostilities regardless.

Lily's mother was a tall woman, blond-haired and horse-faced to an extent, though her green, almond-shaped eyes made her look more attractive than her older daughter. She was in the kitchen when Lily led Remus through the house tour, and offered him a sharp look and a small smile.

"Mum, Remus Lupin. Remus, my mum, Monica Evans."

"Pleasure to meet you, Mrs Evans," Remus said, extending her hand, which she shook with a bit of a perfunctory hold.

"It is lovely to meet you as well, Remus. Sit, sit, please. You must be tired from your trip, and you're just in time for dinner. Lily, Petunia, be my dears and set the table."

"Oh, no, I'll help," Remus hurried to say, side-stepping the chair she'd indicated to follow Lily's instructions where she'd pointed at the drawer with eating utensils.

"Nonsense," Mrs Evans replied, "you're a boy, and I have two girls to deal with it already. Now, you'll sit across from Lily, of course–"

"Mum, would you please let us deal with this?" Lily interrupted her. "And Remus will sit next to me, because this is not a high society function, and we're not involved, no matter what you keep thinking. It's just dinner."

"It is Remus' first dinner with our family, and I've never let Severus sit next to you, either, have I?"

Lily rolled her eyes. "Only not since we turned thirteen. You were perfectly content to let us sit wherever we wanted when we were kids."

"And now you're not anymore, so you will indulge me."

"Mum, for Christ's sake," Lily muttered. "Fine, you let Remus sit at the other head of the table, if you insist on being all stuffy about it, and you can sit next to Petunia."

"Of course I'll sit by myself in that case, and _you'll_ sit next to Petunia."

Lily growled under her breath, though no doubt quietly enough that Mrs Evans couldn't hear. Petunia, on the other hand, stomped her feet as she circled the table, placing plates upon it.

"Because we suddenly care about what is _proper and decent_ in this house," she said sharply to the other two women. "And if you're all so reluctant to sit on my side of the table, then you can jolly well leave it all to me!"

Handing the knives, spoons and forks to Petunia, Remus floundered for anything to stop the bickering between the three women. He caught Lily's eye, and she shook her head lightly, whispering a she walked past him: "Ignore this; Mum gets like this every time she has to play hostess to someone new. She'll settle down when we sit for dinner. Or, better yet, let's go see what Dad's doing, I'm sure you two can find plenty more to talk about than you could with my lot here."

"Lily, are you sure?"

"Perfectly sure. He and Severus can spend hours debating history and literature, and _I know_ you love reading Muggle classics." She gave him a little grin. "Maybe I can actually get all three of you into a debate, I'd pay good money to see who'd rise to the top of that one."

"You're a wicked, wicked person, Lily Evans," Remus told her, feeling more than a bit relieved when she grabbed hold of his elbow and tugged him out of the kitchen, even though the thought of spending time with Snape of all people was one to sour his mood. That was the part of his visit that he was actively dreading – he wasn't in the mood to be insulted and belittled by the likes of Snape. But, for Lily, he promised he'd try, and he wasn't about to walk over that promise.

Lily knocked on her father's ajar door and pushed Remus into the study, instructing her father to entertain the only other male in the house, because he was being overwhelmed by oestrogen in the kitchen. Then she vanished back, and Remus was encouraged to take a seat, and immediately engaged in a topic that was surprisingly easy to debate – the difference between wizarding and Muggle world from a perspective of someone who had one foot in both, and how the societies differed.

Stephen Evans was an amazing conversationalist, and Lily had been absolutely right that they'd find shared topics of conversation. They entered the kitchen half an hour later still deep in their debate, and only broke it off when Lily cleared her throat and Petunia made a snappy comment about something. The dinner itself, being the first moment where the whole Evans family was together for Remus to observe, was a surprisingly imbalanced affair, all told. When the women hijacked the conversation, Mr Evans became very quiet, adding comments only when prompted, and Lily herself seemed to be holding back more than Remus was used to seeing from her. Petunia became moody when Mrs Evans began hinting towards wanting more information about Lily and Remus' relationship, which served to make Remus slightly flustered though Lily had warned him of it – he attributed it to his initial reaction on seeing Lily in her summer form and his own mother's sometimes pointed comments on the same topic – while Lily herself began looking more and more exasperated.

By the time dinner was over, Remus was thankful to finally get a chance to escape to his designated room and spend some time with Lily by herself, but as he lay in bed that night, trying to analyse the evening, he came to the conclusion that if Lily hadn't been telling him about her annoyance with her family's seemingly usual behaviour, Remus would have assigned the whole thing to common and expected family dynamics and not thought about it twice.

Everyone's family was awkward when there was an intruder in their midst, after all, and having had a homemaker mother growing up, he was familiar enough with the type of behaviour that Mrs Evans was demonstrating. Even her excessive obsessiveness with the possibility of Lily and Remus dating was not wholly unexpected given that Lily had said she'd never invited anyone to stay over for two days, let alone two weeks, though it was going to make things awkward if she persisted in it – he'd caught onto the fact that Petunia seemed to be bothered by the implications as much as Lily was, though he wasn't sure how to explain that one, beyond knowing it had nothing to do with the older sister possibly being attracted to him, because Petunia was clear enough in her disdain for Remus' wan appearance and old clothing (this was also something he'd been warned about; apparently, she reacted about the same way to Snape's unkempt look and mismatched Muggle clothing, too) that he wouldn't have confused it in his sleep.

It was only Lily's assurance that this wasn't how she'd perceived her family dynamics in the past that clued Remus into the fact that something was perhaps not quite right, and even then, he wasn't certain how much truly was wrong, and how much was just the fact that she'd grown more aware of the people around her. One thing only, he was sure of – the next couple of weeks were promising to be interesting indeed.


	23. Ch II,20: To Lay Down the Cards

**A/N:** A week late because the first week of September ended up being _insanely_ busy, culminating with a friend's wedding on Saturday followed by a full day of travel (car, plane and train) last Sunday, and capping with the beginning of my PhD position on Monday (I'm officially employed, yay! though it's technically work that counts towards my doctorate thesis, so it's sort of a two-in-one thing, but the most important thing is that I'm actually getting paid).

* * *

 **Chapter 20: To Lay Down the Cards**

"Lily, Snape is at the door!" Petunia's voice rang out through the house, sounding beyond testy. With a flutter of nervousness in her gut, Lily told Remus to stay put in her room and ran down the stairs, tugging on her shirt to unstick it from her sweaty skin. Severus, with his arms crossed and his horribly greasy hair hanging in his face, was looking up at her from the front entrance to the house, scowling. But he had the water with him and that was the most important thing.

"Sev, hi," she said, jumping over the last two steps and landing heavily on her feet, prompting Petunia to grumble about Lily's constant racket. "Come in?"

"I only brought you the water," he replied, his posture practically screaming for her to back off. "I'm going back home."

Lily let out a low whine in the back of her throat and reached out for his hand before she'd even thought about it, giving him a pleading look. "Please? Please try, for me? Just this once, and if you two really can't be in the same room together, then I won't insist anymore."

He stared at her for a long moment, then resignedly sighed. "I wish you wouldn't do this to me, Lily."

"Do what?"

"Look at me like that, and use that tone of voice. I know you're trying to manipulate me; you really have no subtlety at all."

Instantly, she felt hot shame flood her cheeks and let go of his hand as if scalded.

"I'm sorry, I– It's not what I meant to – you're right, that's rotten of me." She cleared her throat and straightened herself. "Nonetheless, it would mean a great deal to me if you tried, so... would you?"

He nodded after a tense moment, and loosened his arms from their tight bind.

"I'm not going to make any promises, though."

Rewarding him with a wide smile, Lily waved her hand at him, and they each picked up two five-litre bottles to stuff them into the kitchen pantry. Severus had charmed the bottles with the Featherweight Charm that they couldn't remove since they couldn't perform magic in her house, so Lily grabbed a black marker out of a drawer in passing to write a warning on them so that the other inhabitants wouldn't be caught unawares.

There was absolutely zero sign of rain on the horizon, and the country was getting antsier and antsier about the drought it was experiencing, to the point where everyone was being vigorously encouraged to conserve water. Lily and Petunia had even shared the shower yesterday, an experience that had been as awkward as it had been unprecedented, but it was something their mother was expecting of them to continue doing. The by now widespread measure was switching to standpipes instead of household water delivery systems, which meant having to wait for one's turn and lug water in pails and bottles as if they were living in the farthest corners of the countryside, and not in an urban centre.

Severus had the luck of living in a Wizarding home, which meant that he could simply conjure water for himself – and Lily. No doubt it had looked at the very least strange to see someone as gangly as Severus carrying four huge bottles as if they weighed nothing, but it was far easier for him to cast the Featherweight Charm on them at his home after filling them with _Aguamenti_ than for Lily and her family to go to the standpipe and lug them all the way back home. Neither of them were much concerned about witnesses on the street, because Muggles didn't tend to intuit magic when it wasn't being performed directly in front of them, and were thus far more likely to think the bottles were empty, than to presume someone had magically made them lighter.

That done, Lily led the way back to her room, where Remus was sitting on the floor as she'd left him, perusing a film magazine. When he noticed them, he offered a curt nod of his head, but kept silent, and Severus in turn glared at him without a word, leaving Lily standing between them both figuratively and literally.

Well, she'd made her own bed here; nothing else to do but lie in it.

She plopped herself on her bed and patted the mattress with her palm, giving Severus a hopeful look. Guardedly, the greasy-haired boy sat himself down next to her, black eyes sweeping from her to Remus and back.

Lily let the awkward silence last half a minute in the vain hope that either of the boys would say something; when neither did, she huffed and leaned over the edge of the bed to peek at the magazine Remus had in his hands.

"There's a theatre in Stoke-on-Trent, we could go see a picture? Are they going to be showing anything interesting in the next couple of weeks?"

"Nothing interesting the whole summer," Remus muttered, shaking his head. " _Taxi Driver_ came out back in February, so I'm not counting on it being in theatres _now_ , and _Carrie_ is only coming out in November."

"What are they about?"

" _Carrie_ is a horror film, based on a book that came out a few years back, you might have seen those posters of a girl covered in blood, and _Taxi Driver_ is a psychological neo-noir thriller, very good from what Ma's told me."

Sighing, Lily leaned back to let the fan blow in her face for a bit. "Maybe we get lucky."

The conversation stalled there, because neither boy seemed much interested in speaking, and Lily grasped for another topic instead.

"Alice is definitely coming to Clotilde's cottage in August, she's managed to wrangle a week away from her Auror Training. I'm really looking forward to seeing her, we've only exchanged letters since the end of the last school year."

"That's nice to hear," Severus murmured from her right, while Remus offered a slight smile and said: "I'm glad you'll have a chance to catch up."

"Mmm, me too," Lily agreed, and apparently that was the end of that conversation thread. She tried another topic, hoping for better luck. "And I got a new bathing suit. A bikini, no less, lovely deep purple colour, Tuney said it goes with my hair. I actually managed to have a couple of outings with her, and the sky didn't fall!"

That brokered no real response, either.

"It's bloody hot weather this summer, isn't it?" she said in frustration, pointedly enough that they could both infer what her problem was.

"Hottest on record so far," Remus agreed, while Severus grunted in acknowledgement, but didn't say much of anything, so that silence again descended upon the trio.

Frustrated, Lily cast around for some topic that could engage them, and her eyes landed on her nightstand, and the book that was at the very bottom of the lowest shelf.

Might as well – she'd wanted to speak with Severus about it for a couple of days, and she knew Remus was quite interested in Magical Theory.

Leaning over the bed, she pulled out the book, letting the others thump down onto the shelf.

"I read it," she told Severus, running her fingers over the spine. It really was a lovely book; worn to an extent, but obviously of higher quality binding.

Severus blinked in surprise. "You did?"

"You didn't think I would, did you?" she asked him pointedly, though she found herself smirking just a bit at his almost flabbergasted expression. Really, after their last conversation on the topic and how much she'd said against Dark Magic in general, she couldn't exactly blame him for being surprised.

"No, I – I thought – the whole thing?"

"Yes. Well, no, not, but... most of it."

"What is it?" Remus asked, putting down the magazine to lean over Lily's knees, trying to catch the title.

"It's about Dark Arts magical theory," Lily said, heart beating faster in her chest as she did so. "Severus lent it to me last week."

Remus' reaction was a bit more drastic than she'd hoped, unfortunately – he jerked back as if he'd touched a live wire, and stared at the book.

"You – What are you trying to do, Snape?" Remus directed his question towards Severus, whose already stormy disposition immediately darkened even further at the accusation in Remus' voice, making him jump to his feet. "Are you trying t–"

"Remus, stop," Lily exclaimed, grabbing hold of his shoulder. "I _asked_ him for the book, because _I_ decided I wanted to learn more about Dark Magic, so don't go throwing asinine accusations around without practically any information whatsoever!"

"It's _Dark Magic_ , Lily!"

"I am perfectly aware of what it is; Severus, _wait_ ," she shot out, scrambling off the bed to grab a hold of Severus' arm to stop him from storming out of the room. He'd risen up with the clear intent of leaving.

"I _will not_ sit here and let this _Dark creature_ accuse me of – of –"

" _Please_! Please, stop, both of you!" Throat thick enough to make it hard to swallow, Lily licked her lips and sniffed. She was _such_ an idiot, for thinking this topic would be anything but a spark to the powder keg of the moment, for thinking there was any way to merge these two aspects of her own life, for believing that there was any way of getting Remus and Severus to bury the hatchet and start over. "I'm sorry I brought this up, I'm an idiot, okay, but I thought – I thought we could have a productive discussion about magical theory, which I know both of you like, because – because I don't want to spend the next two weeks, let alone the _rest of my life_ , having to choose whom I spend time with!" Wiping the couple of tears that slipped out, she dropped herself onto her bed, while the two boys stared at her in thick, loaded silence. God, she hated how leaky she'd gotten this week – but she was a winter child, and the heat was _unbearable_ , sticky and cloying and suffocating, and with how little she'd managed to sleep, and now her idiotically unreasonable expectations were proving to be as misguided as both boys had tried to warn her they were... well, perhaps she was having the case of pre-menstrual symptoms a bit more than was usual for her.

She should have realised how on edge she'd been before she'd put all of them in this stupid position. She should have just not insisted on Severus and Remus finding a way to get along, instead of forcing it out of a stupid need for _something_ to go right this summer.

And of course, par for the course, things only moved from bad to worse from there, when Petunia pushed the door open, her voice cutting through the tension as she asked: "What is going on here? Are you fighting?"

"None of your business, Tuney," Severus shot back with a sneer. "Move along, this is magical business."

"Dark magical business, to hear you yelling it," she noted, crossing her arms to lean against the doorframe, before she swept her shrewd eyes over Lily and Remus. "I wonder what Dad would have to say if he knew you were talking about Dark Magic."

"Petunia, would you please leave us alone?" Lily asked, scrunching her nose in displeasure at how thick her voice sounded. "It's really not your business."

"I guess it's not, is it," Petunia responded sharply. "I guess I'm just the stupid Muggle who doesn't know what she could _possibly_ have overheard."

"Suppose even an idiot can be right once in a while," Severus told her.

"Well, this idiot just _happens_ to know that you're very interested in an extremist group who apparently wants to start a war with people like my sister. This idiot just _happens_ to understand that he is some sort of Dark creature. This idiot just _happens_ to know that _you two made my sister cry_ , and _this idiot_ knows that if _our father_ hears about any of this, you'd never see the inside of this house again!"

" _Petunia_! For Merlin's sake, _leave off_!" Lily exclaimed, shooting off the bed at the thought of her summer plans going up in flames because of Petunia's need to act overprotectively all of a sudden. "You have no idea what you're talking about at all, and I don't need you to be defending me! It's nothing _like_ that, all right?!"

Petunia's nostrils flared, and an ugly redness spread over her face.

"Fine, _Liliput_ ; see if I ever care about your upset again."

"Bloody hell, would you stop?! This isn't _about_ you! This is between me and the two of them, and I don't need you fighting my battles for me! I don't need you acting like you detest me when it's the two of us and then trying to pretend that you care about protecting me when my friends are here to witness it! You barged in here, in the middle of _our_ disagreement, and then you act wounded when you have no clue what you're even interrupting and get told so! Stop being so self-obsessed finally!"

"Me being self-obsessed? _Me_?! You have the _gall_ to call _me_ that?! I should have known all that for the last couple of weeks was horseshite; typical Lily, I should never have expected you to have changed in the least." Petunia sniffed, blinking glassy, reddish eyes that glared coldly at Lily, and the look felt like a stab to the gut, because she couldn't remember the last time she'd seen Petunia cry, and that was where they were at now, suddenly, somehow. "You want me to choose, Liliput? You want me to stop acting like your sister? That's just fine with me. We're not sisters anymore. There, you happy now?"

Sniffing, Petunia spun on her heels and fled the room, leaving shocked silence in its wake.

Then Petunia's words fully hit her, and Lily burst into proper sobs, dropping back on the bed and covering her face with her hands, as her insides twisted in on themselves. It felt like almost physical pain, as bad as that moment when Severus had called her 'Mudblood'. _Nothing_ had gone right today, nothing had gone the way she'd wanted it to, and now suddenly all her efforts to rebuild her relationship with Petunia were gone too, up in smoke, and somehow she herself had caused it, somehow, she'd managed to ruin everything, with everyone. A failure, that was all she was; a complete failure at being a good sister and a good friend.

"I want to say 'good riddance', but that was extreme, even for her," Severus said quietly, while on the other side, the bed dipped and Lily felt a hand begin to gently rub her back.

"What _was_ that about?" Remus asked, just as quietly.

"I don't know; Tuney's always been about keeping up appearances. I wouldn't have thought something like this would be in her character, not with us to witness it."

"I think she might have really been hurt by what Lily said. She did seem to have come in to check on whether Lily was crying."

Severus huffed. "As if she's ever cared about that. No, if you ask me, _that_ was about the fact that in her vapid head, she's the only one with the blanket right to rag on her sister, and we're infringing on that right."

"Oh, shut up, Severus!" Lily exclaimed, choking down a sob. "You don't know her! You don't know what we're like when you aren't there to antagonise her!"

"No, because hearing you tell it is, I guess, not enough for me to understand," he replied scathingly. "She calls you a 'freak' and puts you down and treats you like you're her competition for your parents' attention. But now that you're fighting back, she gets to say she's done with you? Emotional manipulation is exactly in her repertoire, and this is nothing more than that."

"I think there might be more to it," Remus disagreed. "She really _did_ look like she was about to cry."

"What would you know, wolf? You've only met her a couple of days ago."

"Maybe that gives me the distance to see things another way, have you ever thought of that, Snivellus? Maybe if you weren't so focused on this tug-of-war you seem to have going with Lily's sister over Lily, as if she were your _possession_ , you might actually see that you aren't doing any better for Lily than she did!"

"Are you accusing me of–"

"What more?" Lily interrupted them. "What more is there to it?"

"What she did reminds me of Sirius, back in our second year, when Regulus had just arrived at Hogwarts. Regulus would get in a scrape with a Gryffindor, or even a Slytherin, and Sirius would step in to protect him. It's the only time I've ever seen Sirius be nice to his brother. Of course, Regulus always rebuffed his actions, and Sirius would always be angry and hurt afterwards, thinking Regulus was ashamed of him for being in Gryffindor, instead of seeing that his brother's actions were about trying to assert his own presence at Hogwarts independent of his older brother."

Severus scoffed. "Of course that ingrate wouldn't have understood he was only doing more harm than good; Regulus took some serious slack from the Slytherins over it, they'd never let him forget he needed to be rescued by his Gryffindor brother every time it happened. What does that prove?"

"If you'd let me _finish_ ," Remus growled back. "The point is that Sirius was reacting in this way because he was afraid Regulus would reject him for choosing to be true to himself, and so every single action Regulus made, he interpreted as further proof that his fears were true, until now, they are."

"But what does that prove about Petunia?"

"She's taking out her issues on you, while refusing to tell you what they are," Severus clarified with a roll of his eyes. "What else is new?"

"Well, _I_ think that it might be worth it to confront her about it. Maybe if you can figure out what she's so afraid of, you could reassure her about it, and she'd stop acting so erratically as you described. Maybe she's just afraid of losing you."

"So she treats her like shit because of that? What kind of bloody logic is _that_?"

"Wouldn't you be the expert on that, Snape?" Remus snapped sharply.

"I have _never_ –"

"No? So you weren't the one who called Lily 'Mu–"

"No, Remus, you're wrong," Lily interrupted him, shaking her head as she wiped her cheeks and sniffed past her now stuffed nose. "You may be right about Petunia, but you're dead wrong about Severus, so don't even finish that sentence, all right? You really don't know anything about how Severus and I are with each other, so please don't go making assumptions. And the same goes for you, Sev, about me and Remus. Neither of you knows, because neither of you _wants_ to know, not really. If you did, you'd not be trying to find every single opportunity to be at each other's throats. So just... just stop." Exhaling noisily through her mouth, Lily walked over to her vanity to dig up paper tissues with which to clear her nose and wipe her cheeks. "Sev, I'll walk you out. Remus, I hope you won't mind finding something to entertain yourself with for a little while? I need to have a proper talk with my sister, before this festers."

Severus gave her a pointed look, and in response, Lily just pushed him gently towards the door.

"You are not staying here, Severus; this is between me and Petunia, and if I leave you here to see the aftermath, you are more likely to burn the house down in your need to fight with Remus than you are to be of any assistance or support to me afterwards."

"What? No, Lily, that's not – I wouldn't –"

"Sev, please."

He exhaled angrily, but finally began cooperating with her and letting her steer him down the stairs. At the door, he turned back to meet her eyes.

"I'll be in our spot later; will you come tell me how it goes?"

"Why do you care? You hate Petunia."

"Why do I c– Isn't that what true friends do?" he demanded, crossing his arms over his chest defensively. "It upsets you; I care. I should say that's more than enough, irrespective of my feelings for Tuney."

Heat flooded Lily's cheeks, at the very genuine vehemence in his voice, at the almost casual way he'd said it, as if he truly wasn't in the least ashamed or frightened of the sentiment, and too at the fact that she'd implied she wasn't expecting him to, that she'd implied her confidence in him providing emotional support for her was non-existent.

Impulsively, she swung herself forward and wrapped her hands around his neck tightly, pressing her face into his shoulder, trying to show him in the best way she knew how the tangled mess of emotion in her own chest, the apology for hurtful assumptions leftover from before their friendship reset and the pleasure at what he felt for her. He barely moved under her, frozen stiff as a board, and before she could let him try to find his footing, she pulled back to place a quick peck on his cheek, the little bristles there tickling her lips. When she pulled back, he was beet-red, looking at her with disbelief and confusion and a bit of pleasure, and hidden behind it, in the intensity of his gaze, the guarded longing that suddenly reminded her of that big unsaid thing between them, his love for her that was decidedly romantic, and her own for him which no doubt didn't even begin to match that in any possible way.

Still, she squeezed his fingers and gave him as genuine a smile as she could, pulling away to a safe distance. Now wasn't the time to delve into that particular snake pit.

"Thank you, Severus; I needed to hear that. I'll come by later and tell you all about it. Alone," she promised, a reward for not being the first one to start anything with Remus, for not being as careless about the situation with Petunia as she knew he could be.

"I – I should – I mean, I've got –" he stammered, pointing with his hand towards the street. She nodded, leaning herself a bit against the door to see him out, but to her surprise, after only a couple of steps, he turned back to her. "I'll try harder with Lupin, for you," he promised, parting words, and then he was gone, leaving Lily to close the door and lean heavily against it as she tried to calm down the torrent brewing in her chest, forcing herself to turn her mind to Petunia.

She was going to need all the self-possession and self-control she had for this, but suddenly, she knew this needed to be done. It was the equivalent of that pivotal conversation she and Severus had had at the beginning of June, and until it happened, everything else was just gloss of new paint on an old, non-functioning rust bucket.

Hopefully Remus wouldn't think less of her and her family for so much conflict being his first impression of them.

* * *

Petunia was in her room when Lily barged in, sitting on the bed and flipping one of her magazines back and forth with far too much viciousness to be truly reading it. Perhaps she should have knocked, but she'd been doubtful her sister would respond, and after all, Petunia had done it first.

And for once, perhaps Severus was right. Perhaps Lily _did_ have the right to be angry at Petunia right back, because whether or not Petunia was right in her constant anger at Lily, it wasn't _fair_ that she'd do so without actually _saying_ what it was that she was angry _about_. And Lily wasn't her punching bag on which she vented her own personal issues, either.

"Get out!" Petunia exclaimed as soon as Lily had stepped foot in the room, jumping to try and slam the door back. "Get out of my room!"

"What is your goddamned problem, Petunia?" Lily shot back just as wrathfully, tugging the door right out of her sister's reach and slamming it so that she could lean against it and block Petunia's exit. "Because I am sick of you acting hot and cold with me all the bloody time. You do nothing but insult me with every single sentence, you constantly belittle any and all concerns I share with you, and in the same breath you give yourself the right to act like my guardian and interfere with my affairs, but only in those ways and moments that suit you, never mind what I think or say or want. Do you think this is how normal people communicate? What have I done to you for you to continually treat me this way? Is it about my magic, that I lucked out on this cosmic lotto and you didn't? Is it because I left you behind and went off to my other world? Is it that I snuck into your room and found that damned letter from Dumbledore? _What_?!"

"Well, when you're asking so nicely," Petunia sneered back, fists clenched from what was visible of them from her crossed arms, "it's that your freakish, ungrateful ways are polluting this house and this family, and they've been doing that since day one!"

Even the Lily of before the last four months would have known this for the pathetic attempt at evasion that it was.

"And now for the truth," Lily said sharply. "If you detest me as much as you seem to, Petunia, then fine, I accept your feelings for me, and we will not have anything to say to each other from here on out. But you will bloody well tell me the true reason for it. _What is your problem with me?!_ "

Petunia barked out a laugh, sounding almost half-crazed, and Lily's heart jumped into her throat.

"You know what my goddamned problem is, Lily? It's that you think I'm beneath you! It's that you, with your _magic_ and your _equality for Muggle-borns_ and your obsession about Snape and Death Eaters and injustice, are a bloody hypocrite who thinks that now you have this _other world_ , you get to check in and out of my life whenever it pleases you, and then have the right to get snide and condescending with me as if I'm not smart enough to see that you pity me for not having your precious magic and that you think I'm _less than you_ _for being your fucking Muggle_! I am not your charity case, Lily! There is _nothing_ wrong with my life, or with myself, for not being magical!"

It felt like an open-palmed slap over her face, Petunia's accusation.

"When?! When have I _ever_ given you the impression that this is what I think of you?!"

"Every single sodding time you open your mouth! _How many times_ have I told you not to call me 'Tuney'?! How many times, Lily? And you still do it as if my wishes aren't worth the miniscule amount of consideration!"

"I–"

"How many times have you asked me about my interests and my school and my friends and _my life_ because you genuinely cared? How many times have you gone off on one of your tangents about something or other that bothers you and got offended when I disagreed with you, as if all you expect of me is to sit and be your personal audience without a single independent thought?! How many times have you supposedly asked me for advice and then completely ignored every single thing I told you?! How many times have I just been your Muggle sister who has no idea what she's hearing or what she's seeing, who can't _possibly_ understand anything deep about your magical life?!"

"You're–"

"And when I try to show you that I care about you, when I try to be on your side, you won't even tell me what the problems are at all! You don't confide in me, you don't respect my wishes or my opinion, you don't take interest in my life, all you care about is that I am the stupid Muggle who has no idea what you're on about so you get to lord yourself over me as if you're somehow better than I am and I should be _thankful_ for you giving me the time of day out of your busy schedule! My goddamned problem with you, Lily, is that you have become so much a part of your precious magical world, that you've become _just_ like them, seeing everyone who can't do magic as if they're somehow a lesser species! By God, you even use that _disgusting_ , insulting name as if it's perfectly all right! Muggle! That's all I am to you anymore, just your _Muggle_ sister!"

"That isn't true!" Lily yelled back, fury boiling over. "That isn't _fucking true_ , Petunia! I don't give two sodding _shits_ whether or not you can do magic, and I never have! You're the one who started calling me a freak and who acted as if I'm dirty for being magical! You're the one who never wanted to talk about anything anymore, and I don't need your advice if it's going to be delivered in your hateful tone, if you're going to try to make me feel stupid for asking for it in the first place! I've stopped telling you things, Petunia, because you never, _ever_ care except when it suits you, and how the fuck am I supposed to know when that is?!" Breathing heavily, Lily swallowed, her throat scratchy and dry. "All I ever wanted was for us to be like we were as kids, Petunia."

"We stopped being like that, Lily, when Snape took you away to your magical world."

"No! No, you don't get to blame Severus for any of it! You don't get to reassign blame as it suits you! Magic was _always_ a part of me, and I would have gone to Hogwarts regardless of him. And I can't split myself in two! I can't be 'Lily the witch' and 'Petunia's sister Lily'! I can't forget nine months out of my year when I'm here for the remaining three, just to soothe your problems with it! I tried to share it with you, I tried from the start to make it for you the way it had been for me when you'd started primary and I had to stay home! But you'd always get angry and annoyed and start trying to make me feel small and unimportant and insignificant, and now you're blaming me for refusing to let you do that to me by saying that it's my fault, and that I'm looking down on you for not having magic?! That is on _you_ , Petunia!"

"It is n–"

"Yes, it is! You're my _sister_ , Petunia, my _only_ sister! How horrible a person you think me to be, that I could see _you_ of everyone in the _world_ as being a second-class citizen?!" Petunia said nothing, and Lily swallowed. "Now, I'll admit that I am too careless with you, that I'm perhaps too influenced by how things work in the magical world to mind how you might perceive it, I can acknowledge that possibility. And you're right, being called a Muggle when you find it insulting and had no say in the word is hurtful and belittling, and yes, you're right, I always forget that you hate your old nickname and that makes me a heel." Lily's voice hardened. "But you do _not_ get to blame everything else on me, too. I can't control Mum and Dad, I can't influence what happens here when I'm up in Scotland, and I can't control you and how you perceive the world. I get that my lack of interest in the non-magical part of my life annoys you, but you do not get to project your inadequacies on me–"

" _My inadequacies_?!" Petunia demanded shrilly, face twisting in insult.

"You're spinning reasons for our conflict out of things that aren't true, things that I'm not bloody well doing, because you're feeling threatened by not measuring up to those parts of me _I can_ _'_ _t change_! Which you never needed to do in the first place, because _nothing_ in the magical world could _ever_ displace you in my life! I'm willing to acknowledge I'm not perfect in this, but take your own share of the fucking blame, Petunia. You are the one who rejected me first, for growing up differently from you, for going where you couldn't follow, as if that was my choice. You have consistently pushed me away, and if you think that isn't half the reason I only ever seem to have any interest in magical things, then you a bloody idiot, because _you_ are the one living in the non-magical world, and _you_ are my only true contact with it, and if I'm not going to share it with you, then I sure as hell don't have anyone _else_ to share it with, so why the hell should I even engage at all, when the other side is always, _always_ so welcoming in comparison! So if you have problems with me or my behaviour towards you, then you bloody come and tell me, to my face, in a respectful and direct manner, instead of being snide and using sarcasm and insults that tell nothing, and then somehow imagine I can _magically divine_ what the issue is."

Taking a deep breath, Lily pushed herself off the door, raising her hand when Petunia opened her mouth to speak. There was no point to this screaming match unless she could get through to Petunia, and for all that her sister's insults had hurt more than any other until now, at least now she understood where the problem was – with wrong perceptions and feelings of personal inadequacy, no doubt on both sides, that had fed into each other until now both of them had become so dead-set on their view of the other, that they couldn't escape it.

But Lily was different now, and she could admit to being wrong more times than she wanted, wrong in ways that Petunia had called her out on. Given Petunia's personality, if she wasn't the first to reach out, no matter just how hurt she was by Petunia's opinion of her, then the two of them were done as of now, because Petunia never would get over her own pride, not for Lily's sake, probably not for anyone's.

"I am sorry for calling you by your old nickname, I apologise for doing it and not stopping when you asked me over and over; obviously, I had only ever seen it as how things used to be, and I wanted to go back to that, but for you, it's come to mean something else, and I should have minded your wishes even if I didn't understand them. I won't call you that again. And from now on, I'll not call you 'Muggle' either; is non-magical acceptable? You know it's necessary to delineate this sometimes."

Stiffly, Petunia nodded.

"As for the rest – I care, _of course_ I care, and I want to know about you and your life, Petunia, but this goes both ways, and I don't want to expend all my energy on trying to keep on your good side if you're not willing to be my sister, _actually_ be my sister, in return. I don't have the patience or the time or will for it anymore. You want us to have any sort of relationship? You be straight with me, and I'll give you the same courtesy. I love you, and I'll always love you, you're my big sister, but we're not children anymore, and if we can't find a way to coexist peacefully as adults, then I want us both to acknowledge that and move on. That's all I have to say."

Lily only waited until Petunia gave another stiff nod to indicate she'd recognised the ball was in her court, before slipping out the door and closing it behind herself. Swallowing with difficulty, she walked back to her room, where Remus was already staring at the door with a worried frown between his eyebrows.

"How much did you hear?" she asked him softly.

"Most of it," Remus admitted, just as quietly.

"Do you agree with her?"

"I don't know your relationship enough to say one way or another, but I absolutely don't think you'd ever consciously be bigoted against anyone. That said, she's right about the fact that the wizarding world sees Mu– non-magicals as second-class, maybe even less than human, and it's not just the Pure-bloods, it's the whole society. It's the reason why Grindelwald was so successful back in the day, because he campaigned on the idea that non-magicals need to be controlled, for their own good, and even the most progressive Muggle-lovers out there didn't think twice about it, because they'd grown up with such views. You and I, the Muggle-borns and the Muggle-raiseds, we see the wrongness in it, but even we succumb to it by the time we become full-fledged members of wizarding society. So perhaps she's become aware of it, and she's projecting it onto you."

"Or perhaps she's right in that I've subconsciously picked it up, without even realising." Closing the door behind her, Lily sat down on her bed next to Remus, blinking the tears out of her eyes until they slipped down her cheeks, the hurt of her sister's accusation leaking quietly, unacknowledged. "It's so messed up, you know? It's just like with Severus – we've developed patterns of behaviour, and we don't understand each other's problems that feed into it, and to hear her think that I'm the equivalent of a, a... racist, in her eyes, that I'd ever see _her_ in that way... Remus, that really hurt."

Sighing, Remus pulled on her arm until he'd tucked her into his armpit and encircled his arms around her, so that she could cry herself out into his shirt.

"You'll work it out, Lily. You're working things out with Snape, and I think she'll come around, too. She loves you, no matter how she acts; she'd not be nearly as upset with you if she didn't."

"I'm so _tired_ of having to be the strong one, of, of, having to find the perseverance to fix everything, but I don't have a choice, do I, because it's on me as much as it is on them."

"You do have a choice, Lily; you could choose to give up. But you know, deep down inside, you know that you can do this, and more importantly, I think you know you _want_ to do it more than anything. And every time you feel too tired to go on, just remember that you wouldn't have even reached this point if they hadn't wanted to work it out with you, too."

A knot lodged in Lily's throat at the words, at the buried pain and devastation behind them. Yes, she was lucky, at least where Severus was concerned. She didn't know about Petunia, not yet, but she could hope, and perhaps that tie of sisterhood that bound her so tightly to the elder girl would work the other way as well, enough to let them finally come to peace with each other. Remus didn't have that with the other three boys, because they'd summarily discarded him. All he had was pain and regrets, and trying to be the best person he could be, when he'd already paid the cost for it.

Sniffing, Lily pulled herself up enough to put a probably disgustingly wet kiss on Remus cheek, before resettling herself against him more comfortably and letting his support finally calm her turbulent thoughts and feelings into a semblance of normalcy.

* * *

"So, what are we doing today?" Athenora Adelmann asked as she stepped onto the back porch of the Potter Manor, the one overlooking the stables. Turning his head to look at her, James smiled.

"Well, I was told to find my own entertainment for the day, but if you have a better idea..."

"Actually, I'd say I do. Why don't I Apparate us to the seaside, and we have a picnic?"

"And the girls?"

Athenora sniggered. "Our girls can take care of themselves for a day; last I checked, your mother was planning out their whole day, and I've been graciously excused from the hunt for baby clothes."

"Baby clothes?"

"Queenie's nephew is going to have a baby by the end of the summer; that's half the reason she's come with, you know. She's moving over to the Scamanders' to help with preparations, the baby's supposed to be arriving in a few weeks, and of course, to help once the little screamer arrives."

"Ah. Well, we'll miss her," James said with a shrug, though honestly enough. After a fortnight, he was able to say, with quite a bit of surprise, that he was thoroughly enjoying his parents' summer guests. Queenie Goldstein was a vivacious middle-aged woman who delighted in entertaining the room; Leonora Adelmann, by contrast, was far more reserved in her countenance, if not in her stories. Still, it was Athenora who commanded almost all of James' attention – she spoke significantly less in the elder women's presence than when she and James were left to their own devices, but in private, she was showing herself to be extremely well educated and, more importantly, firmly opinionated on a great number of topics, as well as an independent spirit, all things that appealed to James enormously. "You and Mrs Adelmann are staying, though?"

"Unless you're kicking us out," Athenora replied, offering him a mischievous smile. "Queenie was only staying here to make it easier for your mother and mine to become friends. But I'm sure you'll see more of me even after I leave – now that Mom and Gerald have settled on a spring date for their wedding, she'll be coming and going for a while yet; I'm still lobbying for Gerald to move to Boston, and I think he will, so there will be his move to organize as well, eventually."

"And when _are_ you leaving?"

Athenora shrugged. "Some time in August, it depends on my friends more than me. Now, do you want to go to the beach?"

"In this weather? What else is there to do?" James agreed with an easy smile.

It took them an hour or so to pack everything they needed for a beach picnic and wait for the house elves to make their lunch, and then Athenora's fingers were laced with his and they were lurching to a stop on a quiet, isolated little beach. As they'd needed Athenora to Apparate James without activating the Trace, she'd suggested one of the wizarding beaches scattered all along the coastline of England, hidden from view of Muggles with Ministry-maintained wards. It also seemed to be one of the private ones that were bought out by certain families or companies, as James noted that at least the little slice of it they had was pretty empty.

"How did you find this place?" he asked, taking off his shoes to bury his feet in the sand.

"My father used to bring me here when I was little," Athenora answered, following his example and bending to pick up her flats, momentarily giving James a rather nice view of her arse in tight shorts. "Our company is a major distributor of the Floo powder in the States, so when he was alive, he would usually come to Britain a few times a year for meetings with the Floo-Pow executives, and he'd take me with. In the summer, we'd always come here at some point of the trip." She smiled wistfully and a bit sadly, sweeping her gaze over the horizon. "I haven't been back here since he died."

Feeling a pang of sympathy, James took her hand in his, making the girl glance at him.

"How long ago did he die?"

"It'll be six years in September."

She squeezed his hand and tugged him with her when she began walking, and James found his heart beating faster from the contact, suddenly knowing with inexplicable certainty that today was the day he'd kiss her, if only he played his cards right.

They set up their towels and the parasol Athenora enlarged from their basket, and then stripped to their swimwear and splashed into the sea for a swim, and James was more than a little pleased to note that either his companion clearly preferred Muggle swimwear or that American Wizarding styles were more progressive, because Athenora wore a brown-and-blue patterned bikini that looked amazing on her, and also revealed so much skin James' mind glazed over a bit for a few moments, before he managed to shake it off.

He swam out into the open water to expel some extra energy and then returned to the shallows, where Athenora was floating on her back with her arms stretched out and her strawberry blonde hair haloing her head.

"I remember," Athenora said when James had approached close enough that she could speak softly and still be heard, "that my dad would always use magic to make our beach days more fun. He had a whole repertoire of all kinds of water manipulation spells, and he'd also help me make these elaborate sand castles." She pinched her nose shut and dunked her head back, no doubt to cool her face, before straightening up and giving James a smile that looked more genuinely happy than any he'd seen until now. Summoning her wand from the beach in a mildly impressive show of wandless magic, Athenora then proceeded to demonstrate what she remembered of her father's spells, making water rivulets arch up into the air and form into a variety of shapes, letting them prance and dance around until they came close enough for James to swat them into oblivion with his hands.

"He'd enact all kinds of stories this way," Athenora explained, smiling lightly at James' antics. "I was five or six, I think, the first time he did it, and I remember that I spent the next six months demanding that he do it every time he was putting me to bed, too."

"We could make a sand castle, while we're at it," James suggested. "A tribute to your dad."

"Well, why the hell not," she agreed with a grin. "Come on."

They competed by building replicas of their respective schools to the best of their abilities, helped along by copious amounts of magic. That was one of the nice things about wizarding beaches – it meant that James was free to use his own magic, and his expertise with transfiguration in the end resulted in him unrepentantly claiming victory of their competition, before joining in to help Athenora complete her Ilvermorny model.

"I suppose it'll do," she decided thoughtfully as she inspected the sand construct with her head cocked to the side and her now almost dry hair falling over her shoulder, the strands somewhat stiff from the salt. The sun was just that relentless. "I can do warding any time of day and night, but any other aspect of architecture bores me to tears."

"How would you know that? Anyway, I've always thought it might be an interesting job. We have some rather crazy architectural wonders around here, you know; you should see the Weasleys' Burrow."

"Because one of my best friends is studying it and trust me, when you've heard as much about it as I have, you'll be sick of it too."

She made a disgusted face that made James laugh, and after a moment, joined in with him.

"How come you're never this talkative at home?" he asked the girl after a moment, earning himself a shrug in response.

"There's a time and a place to say certain things," she answered easily, "and in my mother's hearing is often the wrong time and place. What she doesn't know can't hurt her."

"Yeah, I can understand that easily," James agreed. "Is there something she shouldn't know, though?"

Athenora smirked mischievously.

"I don't know, is there?"

James blinked in confusion, and in the time it took him to decipher the meaning of her retort, Athenora had bridged the distance between them and combed her manicured, sandy fingers into his ratty hair and was kissing him full on the mouth, without any hesitation or doubt, mildly salty lips like stiff silk against his own.

Of course, when his momentarily stunned brain managed to grasp the situation, James surged forward, mirroring her gesture by burying his own hand into her hair, his eyes closing of their own accord as her lips parted against his so that he could suck the bottom one between his own and bite it lightly, his heart soaring in triumph when he felt her full-body shiver at his move.

Things became something of a lust-filled fog of sensation and taste after that, far thrilling than James' previous snogging sessions, because, unlike the other girls James had been with before, Athenora pushed back for dominance as hard as James constantly kept attempting to exert, and this left him feeling excitedly off-balance. In the last three years since he'd developed an interest for the fairer sex, James had found that he had more than his choice of potential partners owing to his general popularity in the school. Almost all of those girls were either his age or younger, and they all seemed to fit into the general category of 'good girls'. Unlike Sirius, who seemed to get off on aggression, James preferred girls who preferred or even expected the guy to take control. The one girl who didn't – the only one that counted – was Lily Evans, and James had spun fantasies and fantasies in the darkest hours of the night about what sort of lover she might turn out to be when he finally managed to seduce her, designating her in his mind as the one with whom it'd be different, because everything pertaining to Lily was different – better – than all the other girls around him.

Athenora was no Lily, of course, that much had been obvious from the moment James had laid eyes on her, but he'd really had no idea what to expect when he'd found himself attracted to her more strongly than to any of his prior liaisons. He should have remembered that she was three years older, and now that she was wrestling him down onto the sand-made Ilvermorny so that she could straddle him and kiss a filthy, wet trail from his Adam's apple to his ear, he could do nothing other than groan loudly and buck instinctively under her in search of friction when she bit and sucked on his earlobe.

Her chuckle brought him back just a bit to his senses, and to his distant embarrassment, he whined when she teasingly licked behind his ear with the tip of her tongue and pulled back.

"Easy, loverboy," she said into his ear. "You may have no experience with sand and fucking, but I do, and it's not a fun one. We're not doing it here." Quick as a snake, she placed a peck on his cheek and slid off him, leaving him panting on her ruined sand castle with a very obvious bulge tenting his swimming trunks.

"You're a fucking tease," he gasped out, propping himself up on his elbows to glare at her unrepentantly smug face.

"Patience, James, is one thing you'll thank me for learning," she replied. "Now come on, let's go cool down and then we can have lunch."

Shooting to his feet and with the thirst for revenge singing in his blood, James began running towards her. With almost equal agility to his own, Athenora began sprinting towards the water ahead of him. Her laughter turned to delighted shrieks when his longer legs inevitably allowed him to catch up to her and he flipped her over his shoulder, splashing into the water until he was deep enough to throw her in and dunk her.

They wrestled in the water for a while, and when he got tired of it, James instigated another snogging session that he intended to finish by getting _her_ hot and bothered, but mostly ended up causing himself the same problem. Athenora was, apparently, the type who got off on delayed gratification, because by the time she pushed him away, tripping him neatly into the ocean, she looked flushed and was breathing quite heavily, but was also grinning.

"Oh, the things I need to teach you, Jimmy," she promised, voice a smoky seduction in itself, as she sank down into the water and swam up to him, to wrap her arms around his shoulders and her legs around his waist. "By the time I'm through with you..."

Exhaling sharply as she nipped his neck, James grinned, anticipation curling heavily in the pit of his stomach.

"How about we cut this trip short and get down to it?"

She snickered lightly, hot breath ghosting over his skin in a delicious way, and pulled back a bit to meet his gaze.

"Tell me, James, how much experience do you _really_ have?"

* * *

Petunia came around.

It wasn't direct, and it wasn't straight, but at least it was more respectful than Lily could ever remember, and for all that it didn't erase anything, it still felt like a true new beginning. Lily allowed Petunia her time, as much as it hurt, and instead spent her days with Remus, reading books, watching films on the telly, and playing wizarding chess she'd gotten from a Christmas cracker that one year she'd stayed at Hogwarts for the winter hols, at which they were both so horrible the figurines mostly devolved into very profane arguing and general insubordination, until Lily and Remus were moving them around completely at random and laughing to the point of having to run to the bathroom for fear of peeing their pants. And once, they even went to the little dance hall in town in the evening and spent a few hours surrounded by loud pop and rock music, getting sweaty not because of the weather (or not _just_ because of it) but rather because they were jumping and dancing among a throng of other young people who were feeling the same things that Lily and Remus themselves were.

Lily met up with Severus that first afternoon, and spent a quiet, restful hour and a half with him, going over the Dark Arts book he'd lent her. She'd forgotten, in the turbulence that had been the end of the year, just how well he could explain things, when he really wanted to. She'd forgotten, too, that studying was not nearly the same thing as research, and that for all that she'd found study sessions with Remus to be far more productive, research sessions with Severus were an incredible rush of moments of brilliance interspersed with throwing caution to the wind and suggesting the most outrageous of things that made them snort or laugh at the possible (and usually explosive) ramifications that could result from them.

She even managed to get Remus and Severus together, three or so days later, and though they both seemed to be biting their tongues more than a little, both seeming very insistent on keeping her between each other as a physical barrier, they still did as they'd promised her and remained civil. This time, Lily came a bit more prepared, pulling out of the attic one of her oldest board games, Ludo, which was deceptively simple and mostly based on pure luck, meaning that as much as they could all snipe at each other, there wasn't much to be angered about when the die fell however it fell.

On their third round – Lily had won one, and Severus the other, so Remus was very determined to win the third – Petunia knocked on the door and asked them what the racket was about. Severus, of all people, was the one who extended a rather condescending invitation to join, and to Lily's surprise, Petunia accepted, though she was forced to sit across from Lily on the floor between the two boys.

She trounced them in the next two rounds, and was very smug about it, prompting insults from Severus, which then turned to Remus when he won the next one, and before the sixth round was done and Lily had won, all three of them were throwing insults and snipes at each other and demanding that they switch to a game of actual skill.

It was a good afternoon, and they stayed playing until well after dinner, getting out of actually having to sit at the dinner table and make small-talk by Lily convincing their mother to let them eat in her room. They switched from one fast-paced game to another, and later in the session, Petunia even agreed to learn to play Exploding Snap, which gave her great opportunity for mockery when the cards exploded in other people's faces, but made her sour quickly enough when that happened to her. They finished out the night with a composite game of Old Maid and Crazy Wizard's Magizoo that Severus had learned from his new Slytherin friends, and it ended up being neck and neck between him and Petunia in total rounds won out of everything, that saw the elder girl triumph with a very skilfully played feint that got Severus to pick up the Old Maid card from her half a round before Remus finished out the game. By the time Severus finally left, it was after nine, and this time, when Lily gave him a hug, he seemed more prepared to reciprocate, which paradoxically made things far less charged than the hug days before.

All in all, it wasn't really a night of bonding, as such, but it was a night when they all got to be just teenagers that they were, without prejudice and magic and previous negative experiences standing in the way much; it also had the benefit of putting Petunia in such a good mood that she told Lily she wouldn't mind if they did something like that together, just the two of them, which made Lily grin like an idiot for the rest of the evening.

In all, given the rather turbulent beginning, it turned out to be a shockingly good week, which was the reason why Lily had the irrational premonition that something bad was on the horizon.

She turned out to be right, though that didn't stop it from hitting her like a Bludger to the sternum when it finally came.

* * *

 **A/N:** A bit of a cliffhanger, but I'm sure you'll all forgive me if I promise to have the next chapter out on time.

Right? :)


	24. Ch II,21: To Shatter into Pieces

**Chapter 21: To Shatter into Pieces**

On the Friday after Remus' arrival to Cokeworth, Lily and he decided to go to Manchester. It was marginally less hot than the previous couple of days, which meant pretty much nothing, really, in the grand scheme of things, but finding little pleasures where they could was about the only counterpoint left available to the relentless heat, so needs must. It took only a little bit of convincing for Lily's mother to stop making a fuss about it – she'd wanted Petunia to go with them, probably as a chaperone, but the elder girl had not been even a little bit interested, which had worked for the two friends – though Monica did relent when Lily pointed out that in their society, they would be considered adults in less than half a year, informing them in passing she'd be out for most of the afternoon so that they'd know to eat out, and they'd managed to be on the bus by nine-thirty in the morning.

Unfortunately, there were no direct lines from Cokeworth to Manchester, which meant that they had to catch the train from Stoke-on-Trent. They arrived at Manchester Piccadilly station after eleven and spent the morning in Manchester's magical district, Boggart Hole, apparently named so after one of the big parks in the city.

"Did I ever tell you how my parents met?" Remus asked with a grin as they stepped past the protection and breathed a sigh of relief at the pleasantly cool temperature on the magical street. Lily lifted her wand and cast a drying charm to get rid of her sweat stains, laughter bubbling up at finally using magic after more than a month without.

"No, I don't think you did," she replied. Given that their Hogwarts letters weren't due to arrive for a while yet, they didn't have any specific shopping list, so instead they meandered through, mostly just taking the time to enjoy being surrounded by so much magic and finally not soft-boiling in the sun.

"Well, Ma's a big fan of hiking, and back then, she was working in an insurance office in Cardiff, so it was a lot of sitting around and sorting paperwork and such. So, she decided to go hiking one weekend, and of course you know that there are all sorts of magical beings in densely wooded areas."

"What did she stumble upon? The bookstore's there if you wanted to browse a bit."

"A Boggart," Remus explained, and Lily sniggered as they stepped into the store, realising what had prompted her friend into the story in the first place. "Well, it took a shape of this large, brutish man – one of Ma's childhood friends got attacked on the street when they were in school, so I think that's where her fear came from."

"Let me guess – your dad swooped in to save the day?"

"How'd you know?" Remus said flatly, then smirked. "He turned the Boggart into a mushroom, and of course, Ma's always been far too curious for his explanations to work. He says that he was just going to Obliviate her and be done with it, but to hear her say it, he'd only started tripping over his feet in his haste to try and impress her, because he was so stunned that she wasn't fazed in the least by the magic he'd performed."

"So instead of Obliviating her, he asked her out, and the rest is history."

"Yup. I've seen pictures from their weeding; Ma had a Boggart topper made for their wedding cake."

Lily burst into mirthful laughter at that, imagining how silly that must have looked, given that no one really knew what shape a Boggart _was_ , so it had to have been either the brutish man – not something Lily could imagine anyone _wanting_ on their wedding cake – or else a mushroom.

"It's even sillier than it sounds," Remus agreed with a laugh. "Actually, Ma has it as a mantelpiece still. She loves quirky décor in general, and magic too; adores Cardiff's magical avenue, little as it is."

"Your mother sounds lovely; I'd really like to meet her properly some time."

"I guess that'd only be fair, since I've met your folks."

"Just so long as she _also_ doesn't think you and I are an item," Lily added with a roll of her eyes. "I really thought Mum would lay off it, but I'm obviously not that lucky."

"Well..."

"Oh, not her too! What _is it_ with homemaker mothers and their obsession with their children's non-existent love lives?!"

"Non-existent?"

"Do you see a boyfriend anywhere? Because if you do, I really need to break up with him immediately. I can't handle any more than I already am."

Remus snorted. "Hey, you're preaching to the choir, Lils; Sirius had tried to set me up with one girl or another for the last two years. They always end up politely sending me on my way when they realise I'm not him," his voice dropped. He sighed, giving more focus to browsing the book titles than was strictly necessary, and Lily winced, for the multiple things in that sentence that could have spoiled his mood.

"Well, you'll find someone eventually," she tried to cheer him up. "And you'll do way better on your own than having _Sirius Black_ as your wingman. If I didn't know for a fact he shagged his way through half our year and a quarter of the rest of the House, I'd have sworn he was, y'know, playing for the other team."

"What?" Remus blinked at her, flabbergasted.

"Well, I mean, the way he goes on and on about Potter..."

Remus ended up doubled over in laughter so violent he had to clutch at his stomach to be able to breathe through it.

"Sirius and _James_... Merlin, the _visual_! Jesus, Lily, if it wasn't so hilarious, I'd be cursing you for putting the image of it in my head!"

"What?! Oh, come on, Remus, you can't be telling me you don't see where I'm coming from!" Lily complained.

"No; no, I really don't. Sirius, into men? I think the sky would fall down!" Remus sobered up a bit after a moment and shook his head. "In all seriousness, those two _are_ like brothers in a very intense sort of way – I'll not pretend that our group was anything but James-and-Sirius comedy duo with me and Peter tagging along, I'm no fool – but Sirius would clock anyone who even thought to suggest such a thing to him. He's uh... he's not too keen on homosexuals."

"Is he ever keen on _anyone_ not James?" she asked, wrinkling her nose.

"Well, he _was_ keen on Favelina Edgeford back in October."

"Oh, ew. Have you _seen_ her hair? I swear, I get the urge to hex her bald every time she walks past me, just so as I don't have to look at that horror. The split ends..." she found herself moaning a bit and shaking her head.

"I never said his tastes weren't questionable," Remus replied with a shrug.

"You can say _that_ again," Lily agreed with a shudder, closing the topic.

They wandered away from the bookstore, chatting about what they could do in the afternoon, and found themselves some time later at the little pet store in the corner of a two-storey building. It was a far smaller store than _Magical Menagerie_ in Diagon Alley, but Lily loved animals, and you could always find something surprising in these types of stores – she'd once found a frill-necked lizard of all things.

"Did you have any pets growing up?" she asked Remus as they walked through the lizard section, and she tapped on the glass wall of the snake terrariums.

"No. We moved so often, because of what I am, that it was too impractical. Dad offered to buy me an owl when I started Hogwarts, but I didn't think I'd need one. You?"

"I had a cat; scrawny, nasty little thing that I picked out of the gutter when I was five or six. She detested Mum and wasn't keen on Severus, but loved Petunia, surprisingly enough, though she was mine. I called her Madam Mim."

"Who is that?"

"You know that Disney film, it came out way back when we were very little, _The Sword in the Stone_? The Arthurian legend one?"

"Oh. I've heard of it, but I've not seen it."

"Well," Lily explained, pushing her finger through the cage bars to pet a Crup puppy, "I've always loved magic, and that used to be my favourite film when I was little, because it has dancing dishes and turning into animals and all of those things. Merlin in it is – imagine crotchety Dumbledore in blue robes who gets turned around often, and you get Merlin. And his rival is this witch called Madam Mim, who's a trickster. There's this very fun sequence where they have a magical duel, and Merlin defeats Madam Mim by turning into a virus or something like that and infecting her. She was quite fun – though she loved breaking her own rules, which did annoy me a lot at the time – and the cat always reminded me of her, getting up to no good in the house every chance she got."

"What happened to her?"

"Got run over by a car the year we started Hogwarts. Mum and Dad didn't tell me until I'd come back for winter hols, didn't want to break it to me in a letter. I cried a bucket."

"Never thought about getting another?"

"Cats are a hassle at Hogwarts," Lily said with a shrug as they moved into the owl section. "There's so many of them, I'm surprised class isn't constantly interrupted by cats fighting for territory. And then the castle is so large, you never know where they might end up. And if I were to leave it at home, it wouldn't be mine, it'd be Mum's or Petunia's. Cats pick their person, and you're stuck, so it wouldn't be fair to any of us. Kneazles would be fine, I suppose, but then they're something else entirel– _ooooooh_ ," she breathed out when her eyes fell on a magnificent little rust-coloured, tuft-eared ball of feathers snoozing in a cage.

"Have you found something to your satisfaction, miss?" the young shopkeeper asked, apparently having tracked their path through the store.

"What species is it?"

"He's an eastern screech owl, rufous morph. They're native to America, fully nocturnal, and he's full grown, so if you've a mind to send big packages over long distances, he won't be useful to you, but he's fast and fierce, and despite the name, his species don't actually screech and they're so common in inhabited areas that Muggles won't be in the least surprised if they notice him."

The clothes, no doubt, was what had given them away.

"Lily, are you really going to buy an _owl_?" Remus asked her bemusedly.

"But Remus, look how _adorable_ he is," she replied excitedly; she _really_ wanted the little thing. "How much is he?"

"Three Galleons and eight Sickles; a bit expensive because of the import tax, but worth it."

"Could you send him to me tonight when he wakes up? I don't live in Manchester, and I'd rather not lug him around Muggle areas on my way home."

"Sure, just let me let him get to know you a bit, and then leave your address with me; I'll send him out before I close up." The girl squeezed past Lily, handing her over a leather glove, and opened the cage, coaxing the little owl out until he was shuffling over onto Lily's gloved fingers. His grip was decidedly strong for such a tiny thing – he barely weighed anything at all – which gave Lily confidence that he'd be a good delivery owl despite his size. She bent her head down to meet the owl's sleepy yellow eyes, and in response, the owl cocked his head to the side to observe her.

"Hello, Archimedes," Lily cooed at him, presenting her fingers as she moved them up to pet him, so as not to startle him. "Hello, little guy. You're going to come home with me, aren't you?"

"You're ridiculous," Remus murmured with a snort.

"I know, but that's what makes me unique," Lily chirped back.

"You'll want the cage and the bowls to take, I assume?"

"Yeah, he's my first owl. You can shrink them, I've a way of enlarging them back home."

"All right, then. That'll be four Galleons, two Sickles and seven Knuts. He should hunt on his own, but I'll get you a leaflet on his species so that you know if you need to supplement his diet."

Lily grinned, already utterly in love with the little creature.

Lily's good mood held out all the way through lunch, which they had in Muggle Manchester, and through their walk afterwards. It held out right until they were standing across the street from a four-star hotel, at a bus stop to go to a nice little museum, and Lily's eye got caught on a pair of people walking out of said hotel.

"Lily, is that..."

Lily stood, watching with wide eyed as the man, looking so much like her father she was having a hard time believing it _wasn_ _'_ _t_ him, took a hold of the woman's hands and pressed a kiss to them, before she reciprocated with a kiss on the bearded cheek, right by the corner of the man's mouth. The man shook his head and stepped back, and the woman appeared to sigh as a taxi stopped in front of them. The man opened the door to the taxi and the woman entered, and when he'd closed the door and stepped back, his eyes lifted and met Lily's, and all colour vanished from his face.

"Lily..." Remus said cautiously.

"No," she whispered, feeling bile rise in her throat. "No, no, that's not–"

The man – _her father_ – stepped onto the street, and Lily almost recoiled back into the plastic wall of the bus stop overhang. Then fury surged, burning away the shock, and she clenched her fists and stepped forward forcefully.

"Lily, love–" her father began.

" _Don_ _'_ _t call me love_!" she snarled at him. "Don't! Who was that?"

"It's not what you think."

" _Really_? And what do I think?"

"She's one of my former students–"

"A _student_ ," Lily spat. "Can you _be_ more clichéd? Middle aged professor and young, fit student?"

"No, _Lily, please let me explain_."

"Explain what? That you just walked out of a _hotel_ , holding hands with a woman _not my mother_ , that, that you _kissed her_."

"Lily!" he exclaimed, and she shut her mouth, clenching her teeth as tightly as she could and fighting to keep her tears from spilling. "We're not in a relationship."

"Then _what was that_?"

Her father shook his head. "This is not the place; come on, let's get to my car and I'll explain on the way back home."

"No. No, I am _not_ going home with you! You were supposed to have uni work today! What the hell are you doing in Manchester, meeting up with a former student who is not your _lover_?"

"Lily, please."

"Answer me!"

"I got an offer for a position at Victoria University here in Manchester, that's the uni work I had today."

"What does this have to do with _her_?"

"It... Lily, please? This is not the place for this conversation."

" _Who is she_?"

"She..." he exhaled shakily and ran his hand through his hair, then his beard. "She's– she is a woman I love."

Feeling faint, Lily reeled back, knees shaking, and Remus' arm went around her waist to keep her steady.

"You said... you said you're not–"

"We're not," Stephen reiterated firmly. "We're not, but..."

"Were you? Before?"

"I... yes, but that was– Lily, that was a terrible mistake, an indisc–"

She tasted tears on her lips.

"Are you going to leave Mum? For _her_?"

"Lily, it's not that simple–"

"Yes, it is! You _cheated_ on Mum! You–"

"Lily, your mother and I have been over for a very long time in all the ways that matter."

She shook her head.

"No, that's not true. Mum _loves you_!"

"And I love her, but it's not that simple," he repeated.

"To me it is," Lily said, wiping her dripping nose with the ridge of her hand. "I'm not having this conversation anymore."

"Let me take us all home, and we'll sit down and talk. It's past time for it anyway."

" _Don_ _'_ _t pretend_ ," she snarled at him, "don't pretend you'd have said anything to anyone if I'd not caught you with her! I've known something was wrong for _weeks_ , and you said nothing. Does Mum know? Does Petunia?"

"Lily Victoria Evans," Stephen snapped sharply, and Lily flinched. "We _are_ going home, where we _are_ going to sit down and talk about this. You _will_ let me explain the full extent of the situation."

"You think I will," she said belligerently, grabbing Remus' hand and tugging him forcefully away. "I can't be here anymore."

She didn't turn back to look at her father; she couldn't. Instead, she marched down the street into an alley, to where she was sure no one could easily see her, and then stopped, stuffed her hand into her mouth, and keened, needing to let out _something_ before she suffocated.

"Lily, come on; we should get back," Remus said gently, pulling her into his chest until she could sob into his shirt. It took her a while to be able to breathe, and she clung to him through it, too steeped in her own pain to even appreciate his support.

When she managed to get her breathing under control, she pulled back, digging into her bag for the paper tissues to blow her nose and wipe her eyes, fighting to keep herself steady and not dissolve right back into her tears.

"Do you want to go back with him, or do you want to catch the train?"

"The train," she said defiantly. "He can go bugger himself; I am not spending one minute with him in the car, let alone more than an hour."

"All right; let's go, then, before he gets the car around."

Breathing shakily, Lily nodded her head, letting Remus steer her where they needed to go, trusting him to take care of her when she couldn't handle it herself.

* * *

Her father was at the bus station in Cokeworth when they finally arrived, and Lily sat down into the car without a word, determinedly staring through the window for the whole ride back to their house. When they walked in, Lily followed Stephen to his study, but stayed standing and kept the door open, so that Remus would be within earshot.

"Are you and Mum going to get a divorce?"

"I don't know," her father answered.

"Does she know?"

"She... would rather pretend not to know."

"About that woman, or about the divorce?"

"Both. If it was up to her, we'd pretend that nothing was wrong right into our graves."

"So why don't you? Why do you have to break up our family?"

"We're not; not yet. I did not want to do anything without speaking to you and your sister first."

"Does Petunia know?"

Stephen sighed. "I don't know; perhaps."

"How long?"

"How long what?"

"How long have you been carrying on behind Mum's back? How long have you wanted to leave us? How long has _all this_ been going on?"

Her father swallowed and licked his lips, and Lily's tears spilled down her cheeks again.

"I do not want to leave you, Lily. I _won_ _'_ _t_ leave you. If Monica and I separate, it will not have any bearing on my relationship with you, not in that way."

"You are _ruining our family_! How could you think it wouldn't have a bearing on our relationship, Dad? For that woman, with whom you claim not to even _be_ in a relationship?!"

"For myself, and for your mother," he countered. "Jocasta is the least important piece in this, Lily, and my feelings for her do not come into the equation. That is why I said it was a mistake, and why she and I are nothing more than good friends."

"Then what were you doing in that hotel?"

"Meeting for lunch; I came to discuss the job offer I received, and we met afterwards for lunch _only_ , at the restaurant, not the hotel itself. She has been telling me to face this for the last month, since you came home, and I hesitated, because you've obviously been struggling with something, and I didn't want to add–"

"Don't put this on me! You did what you wanted, Dad! Don't you dare use me as your excuse! And don't use Mum as the excuse, either! If you do this, you'd do it for yourself!"

"No, Lily. I have been unhappy for a long time, that's true, but your mother hasn't been any happier with me, either."

"That's because you've been cheating on her!"

"No, Lily. Jocasta is... she's a symptom of what's wrong with us, she's not the cause. The problems Monica and I have had are far older than my feelings for Jocasta. I've tried to work it out with your mother, but I can't be what she wants me to be, and she can't be what I need her to be. We can coexist, we can function in the same space, but what we have isn't what either of us deserves, and it's not what you girls deserve, either. Couples our age may think the sanctity of the institution to be more important than their own happiness, but I've tried living like that, and I can't agree with them in the least."

"And what does she think?"

"She wants to pretend," he answered bluntly. "And I've gone along with her until now, but frankly, I am sick of it, and I think that she is, too."

"You said vows. You married in _church_. That's forever, Dad. It's supposed to be forever," Lily said, blinking until the new wave of tears spilled so that she could see, sounding young and naïve and desperate even to her own ears.

"Things don't work out like that sometimes, Lily."

She allowed him to get as far as putting his arms around her before she realised what he was doing and jerked back, shaking her head furiously.

"No, don't– I can't look at you Dad, I can't– you're ruining our family, and I– I don't know– I just– Leave me alone, please, I need to– I can't deal with this."

Choking on a sob, she fled for her room, so blinded by tears that she banged into Petunia on the stairs.

"Lily? What is the matter _now_? Why are you crying?"

"I saw Dad– he said–" her voice broke, and another sob broke through. "Go ask him, I can't–"

When she reached her room, she lay down on the bed and hugged her pillow to her chest, crying into it and trying to fight off the deep, swirling hole of despair that was opening in her chest, threatening to devour her. Her family was falling apart, and she didn't even understand why.

* * *

Remus quietly closed the door to Lily's room, letting her have her privacy for now. Below, he could hear the rise of a voice, familiar pitch by now given how often he'd heard Petunia screech and yell. Sighing, he ran his hand through his hair and thought about how he should handle this, what he should do. His only priority, really, was Lily in this; whatever was going on with her parents that they were on the verge of separation, that wasn't his business, and he and Petunia hadn't exchanged much more than greetings in the week he'd been here.

But Lily needed something to calm her down, to help her find her centre in this, so that she could properly talk it over with her parents. With the way she was now, she couldn't do much of anything, and the situation was obviously already volatile enough without adding her quick and hot temper to the mix.

Squaring his shoulders, Remus walked out of the house and down towards the park, following a vaguely familiar route that Lily had explained to him, until he was crossing into the run-down section of town, where the little street named Spinner's End could be found.

Spotting Snape's house wasn't too hard; it had a taste of magic about it that was faint but unmistakeable to his lupine senses. It didn't look much better than any of the other houses, appearance-wise, but there was still something about it that made it distinct enough Remus would have guessed it was his destination even without knowing the correct number.

He stopped in front of the drab little house and found himself wondering how it was that only months ago, he'd had his best friends with him, had known who his enemies were, had had a normal life (or as normal as a lycanthropy-infected teenaged boy ever could), yet now he here was, about to knock on the door of the boy he'd always looked on with pitying contempt, and expecting him to not respond as violently as had been the norm for years, because a family not his own was falling apart somewhere out there, and his only real friend left needed someone more important to her than Remus himself.

He knocked on the door and waited, trying to stop himself from fidgeting until it opened; the person on the other side was a severe-looking woman in extremely conservative Muggle clothing, with black hair tied into a bun and so slicked back it looked like it was pulling her pale skin taught against her skull; she had Snape's black eyes and the facial lines similar enough to his that Remus felt confident in her identity as the other boy's mother.

"Yeah? What do you want?"

"Is Snape – I mean, Severus – here? I need to speak with him urgently," he told her, stumbling over the name and realizing he couldn't remember the last time he'd actually voiced it out loud. Snape had always been 'Snape', or, occasionally, 'Snivellus'. Using his birth name felt outlandishly odd.

The woman narrowed her eyes disapprovingly at him and pulled back into the house; Remus kept his spot at the threshold, knowing well enough that he wasn't being invited in.

"Son!" he heard her voice, slightly muffled. "Get out here! There's some wretch at the door for you!"

Some pounding feet and a quiet conversation later, Snape appeared at the door, his expression souring more than it had already been even before he'd known who it was. Remus assumed Snape could have guessed, anyway.

"What the bloody hell are you doing here?" he hissed, stepping out and closing the door behind him.

"It's Lily," Remus answered, leading with what he knew would be the only thing to get Snape to listen to him without any resistance. "Something's happened."

The other boy's countenance changed in a moment, moving from displeased to frightened so fast Remus found it almost dizzying. The black-haired boy stepped away from the door, and Remus took it as his cue to get them both moving in the direction of Lily's house.

"What's happened? Is she all right?"

"She fine physically. It's about her family."

"Lupin, you better tell me right fucking now–"

"She caught her father with his mistress," Remus blurted out, wincing at the words the moment they were out. "Or, former mistress. We were in Manchester, and she saw them coming out of a hotel restaurant; apparently, the situation is serious enough that her father's talking of divorcing her mother. They had a pretty big row about it out on the street, before we came back, and they talked when we got home, but it didn't seem to go anywhere; she's a mess."

Snape blinked in obvious surprise a few times, but to his credit, didn't slow down even a little bit. They reached Lily's house in record time, and Remus snuck them both inside, past the now highly raised voices from the study – Petunia was making her displeasure known, just as Lily had. Snape paid the noise no mind, stepping without hesitation up the stairs, before slowing down in front of Lily's closed door. He seemed to hesitate a few moments, then raised his hand and knocked softly, before clearly changing his mind and opening it himself.

Remus, a few steps behind him, entered and closed the door just as Snape had crossed the room to reach their friend; for her part, Lily had shot off the bed as soon as she'd realized who had entered, and was now sobbing into Snape's shoulder, arms wrapped tightly around his neck.

The sight of Snape gently, carefully comforting the red-haired girl was the first time that it ever crossed Remus' mind that there was more to the greasy-haired boy than he'd thought, that there was something to Lily's constant insisting on him being a good person. He'd always held intense dislike for the Slytherin classmate, and over the years that dislike had served him well enough in making the other boy seem impersonal so that he had little trouble looking the other way when the other Marauders went after him, even found it easy to look at Snape and think 'I may be a werewolf, but at least I'm not like _him_ '. Even that day of O.W.L.s, the disgust he'd felt at his friends' behaviour and his own, it had never been about the damage they'd done to Snape, only about the damage they'd been doing to themselves and to Lily.

But now? Now Remus found himself feeling an uncomfortable wave of shame and guilt at the thought of those events, not for hurting Lily or for what he and his friends were becoming, but for the fact that he was witnessing Snape being more than that slimy Slytherin who had been dangerously persistent in learning Remus' secret, more than the personification of everything Remus and his friends had ever hated in the world. Suddenly, Snape was a sixteen-year-old boy who cared enough about Remus' perhaps only friend that he was there for her in her time of need the way that was required and more, and that just shed a very uncomfortable light on Remus' own actions over the past school years.

He shook his head to clear those thoughts away, because they were ridiculously inappropriate train of thought for the current occasion, and walked over to them, moving to gently rub Lily's back in a gesture of solidarity. His sharp ears caught her mumbled words – "how could he do that?" and "I don't understand," and "I hate him," and "Why?" – and his heart ached for her. He'd been too young to truly remember how the werewolf's attack on him had almost destroyed his own family, but he did remember the fear of being the cause of his parents' misery, and he imagined that she was feeling that, too, at least partly; after all, which child of unhappy parents didn't?

After a while, Lily calmed down enough to pull back and wipe her eyes with the hem of her shirt; Snape caught her wrist before she managed to wipe the snot, too, and completely ruin the fabric. Sniffling, she accepted Remus' offered paper tissue he'd swiped from her vanity and blew her nose into it. She looked even worse than before, her eyes so bloodshot they were more pink than white, her cheeks splotched and swollen, her hair sweaty and sticking to her face and neck.

"Petunia's done saying her peace?" he guessed at the sound of the front door smashing closed that reached them.

"I think she might have known, or at least intuited. I guess she can't pretend anymore, either. I guess I'm the only one who didn't see it," she concluded, and another few tears spilled down her cheeks, which Snape wiped away with the corner of her sodden tissue.

The sound of heavy footsteps echoed through the upper floor and Lily jerked; someone was climbing the stairs. For a moment, they stood in silence, her green eyes wide and trained on the door. Then she shook her head jerkily and grabbed Remus' sleeve.

"I can't be here right now. Please, Sev."

"The tree?"

Lilly nodded in assent.

In the end, Snape was the first to climb down, looking like an overgrown spider with his long arms and legs, though he did seem to know what he was doing as he moved several steps to the left to a slightly bigger ledge from which he could reach the backyard's one tree, the infamous old oak by the looks of it. He swung onto the branch and slithered down to the ground, hurrying immediately back to the house to be on hand if Lily slipped.

The red-head, however, proved quite as adept at climbing down even teary-eyed, though she looked somewhat better doing it than Snape had. Remus paused only to grab the comforter off her bed and some blankets, along with a bag of wizarding snacks they'd gotten back in Manchester what felt like days ago, before following after them to the echoes of knocks on the door. Unlike them, Remus chose to hang down from the ledge and simply jump to the ground, landing with a quiet thump; he was not one for climbing around, anyway, not if he had another option.

Snape handed him the stuff back, and the three of them took off for that spot Lily had shown him, by the old hollow tree where she and Snape had played as children, the one she called 'their spot'.

They spread the comforter on the wilted yellow grass and seated themselves so that they could rest the blankets against the tree to watch the dry, sad riverbed where their little river used to be; Snape leaned against the tree and tugged Lily into his side, and she responded by shifting almost into his lap and snuggling into his chest, where she started crying again, though quietly and exhaustedly this time, more letting the tears flow than anything else; for his part, the Slytherin wrapped his arms around her with some awkwardness, but he didn't rebuff her in the least. Remus chose to sit on the other side of the comforter, wrapping his arms around his knees and rested his chin on them to stare at the setting sun; the sounds of the factory were distant enough that they weren't intrusive, but they still gave the whole place a feeling of presence that wasn't common in his own hometown.

Lily stayed mostly quiet, sniffling from time to time; Remus found that he didn't mind the silence, his mind too occupied with the events of the day and the thoughts that it seemed more and more that there were no more happy people in the world. With the threat of war hanging over their world, with his father's self-flagellation and his mother's quiet but ever-present sadness, with his own friends so far from him that he felt almost completely alone and more lonely than he could ever remember, with Lily herself and now her parents, even with Snape and what he'd gathered was probably a relatively unhappy home life... it made him wonder if it was even possible to have more than fleeting moments of happiness, more than here and now, to make something of.

One thing was for certain – he could not rely on his friends to hold him up. This summer had proven that, if it had proven anything to him. James, Sirius and Peter, as much as he loved them, obviously weren't the people he'd thought them to be. Perhaps not Peter; he was a follower in nature, and for him, it was easier to do as James and Sirius did. Remus understood that all too well, and he didn't begrudge Peter his behaviour. In truth, there was little to begrudge. Peter's letter meant something, Remus was sure of that. The other two, though...

Sometimes it felt that they were a world unto themselves, James and Sirius, boy and his best friend, the unstoppable comedy duo who only ever let the other two tag along for the kicks and the free pass on misbehaviour, like he'd told Lily earlier in the day. Sirius certainly didn't seem to care much for Remus' opinion. It hurt, not because they were so close – because it seemed to Remus now that, rather than all four of them being friends together, they were all James' friends just staying together for convenience's sake – but because he'd not thought that any of the Marauders could be dismissive the way Sirius had been with Remus these past few months. James, at least, had remembered the last full moon of the school year. It seemed that Sirius thought of Remus so little, he didn't even care about Remus' furry problem, unless it was to use to get back at a too-nosey boy they'd been at war with for years.

Resting his cheek on his knees, Remus studied Lily and Snape, the girl obviously still in her own world of grief for her broken family, the boy seemingly completely absorbed with his care of her. When had any of his friends cared about Remus enough to offer such a thing as their undivided attention? Sure, they'd learned how to turn into animals to help with the wolf, but what had they done with it? Turned right around and let the wolf roam around, supervised by a dog and a deer. If Lily had learned the same skill, she would have used it to calm the wolf somehow, make it more tame, or at least keep it as safely behind locked doors as it was possible for it to be. Remus knew that giving the wolf its freedom once a month had had a positive effect on him, too, had made him less tired and more focused for the rest of the month, had made him feel less jittery in the approaching moon. But the price for it was not something he ever wished to pay, not ever, and the boys had known that from the first day they'd figured him out. They'd known it, and yet Sirius not only hadn't had a problem using it to get back at Snape, he then acted as if Remus was the irrational one in the situation, the one whose sense of security and safety hadn't been violated just as much, whose trust hadn't been betrayed.

"Remus," Lily's voice floated to him, pulled him back to the riverbank. He turned his eyes to her without moving his head; the night was creeping up on them steadily, and in the setting sun, her hair looked almost ablaze, a stark contrast to her pale face and tired eyes. "I'm so sorry; you shouldn't have had to see that. First with Petunia, and now this."

"Don't apologise for it, Lily, please," he answered. "None of this was your fault."

"I should have seen it, I should have... Petunia, she's been acting out this whole time, and I knew something was different, she had never really done that before, but I thought... I thought I'd just been missing it all this time, that she'd... and on the stairs, when I told her, she looked... it was like I had forced her head into a pile of excrement she'd known was there all along, but had done her best to pretend– no, convince herself wasn't there."

"And your mother?" Snape asked, peering down at the top of her head.

"I don't know," Lily replied, shaking her head so that her cheek rubbed against Snape's chest. "She wasn't in the house when we got back. But Dad said... Dad said that she knew, and she didn't want to know. Maybe... maybe that's a family trait, you know? Pretend that what doesn't suit us isn't there. They do it so well, don't they? Maybe I do, too."

"Does it matter?"

"Of course it matters! I don't want to be like that! I don't want to be the kind of person who pretends that her relationships are good and healthy when in fact they're not, and I don't want to be the kind of person who says one thing but thinks another!"

"Isn't that what you father is trying not to do anymore?" Lily blinked at him with betrayed hurt in her eyes, and Remus sighed. "You need to speak with them, Lils, you need to understand the whole thing, or it'll eat you up from the inside."

"I can't."

"You can," Remus insisted, moving to fully turn towards her; her green eyes were rimmed in red, almost hidden under swollen eyelids, but they still met his, almost yearningly, and Remus knew exactly what she needed to hear, what she always needed to hear when she was in these situations. Maybe he was getting better at this friendship thing after all. "Of course you can; you're the strongest person I've ever met. You did it with Petunia, and you did it with Snape, and now you'll do it with your parents, too."

"You think so? Sev?"

Snape made a slightly sour face she couldn't see from her vantage point, that Remus had learned in the past week to identify as something that seemed more ingrained than truly truthful, and nodded.

"I agree with Lupin. No silence."

Lily sniffed and burrowed in against Snape's throat, looking wan and worn out; with the darkness quickly falling over them, Remus didn't think she'd last long.

"I don't even know what to say to him."

"Don't think about it now. Tomorrow, when you're a little rested, you'll know what to say."

Her arm moved out of her lap, fingers extending towards him, and Remus grabbed hold of them; they were a little sweaty, but soft and almost delicate, and there was power in holding the girl's hand that Remus cherished, because, of everyone, only Lily had ever truly stood up for him and against him and with him, that he couldn't but think of her as someone central, someone important in his life, and now when she needed him, he was returning the favour.

"Thanks, Remus."

"You'll get through this, Lils, I know it."

"I hope."

* * *

Lily fell asleep curled up on Severus' lap and chest not long after; Lupin kept hold of her hand well after her shoulders went slack and her breathing evened out, and Severus had to fight to push down the bitter jealousy. Not for the fact that she was holding another boy's hand, because that part was easily silenced by the not inconsiderable weight that was slowly putting his leg to sleep and the warmth that seemed to be melting him from the inside out. No, his jealousy came from the fact that it was Remus bloody Lupin that had the privilege of Lily's friendship to this extent, that had known the right words when Severus hadn't, that had understood Lily's dilemma on a level that Severus hadn't, and that all he himself could have done for her, _had_ done for her, had been to keep his mouth tightly shut and try to think of one thing to say that wouldn't be putting his foot in it.

She'd probably never know, and that was at the same time all right, and so far from it that he could barely stand it. Merlin, but he hated feeling so conflicted, so at odds with everything he'd ever thought himself to be, had ever considered acceptable to do. Even so, the weight and the warmth of her, sleeping trustingly in his arms, was worth all the discomfort and pain he was feeling, and he clung to that like a lifeline, because somewhere between her fingers hesitantly joining his on that train from London and the kiss on the cheek she'd bestowed on him just days ago, he'd found that he'd do anything for her without even protesting, if ever she asked it of him, and that included finding a way of playing board games and sitting in their spot with the boy he detested and feared in equal measure.

"She deserves better," Lupin stated softly, perhaps softly enough that he'd thought Severus wouldn't catch it.

"I cannot believe it," he admitted, surprised to hear his own voice. Lily had been the priority since Lupin had come to get him, but now that she was relatively settled, the magnitude of the situation was finally hitting him, and on a different level, too. The Evanses had been the epitome of a perfect marriage, a perfect family, for him, for years and years. Severus had known since he was very young that his own family was completely messed up, that the way his parents treated each other and him wasn't how it was supposed to be, but he'd not truly had any worthy comparison until Lily had taken him under her wing and brought him into her home.

They had always seemed so very harmonious, so very much in love. Was it possible that so much had changed in the last two years, that they were on the brink of divorce, that they were unfaithful to one another?

He couldn't help but wonder if there even was such a thing as a happy marriage, as a happy relationship. If even the best ones failed, weren't they all doomed from the start? He didn't want it to be so, didn't want it desperately, because he'd already come so close to losing Lily this year, and he didn't think he could go through it again.

"You knew them before," Lupin asked, through it sounded like a statement more than a question.

He didn't intend to answer that, didn't intend to let Lupin in on a single one of his own thoughts, the hatred and the jealousy wouldn't let him.

"I did; they were– they seemed happy."

"They didn't, to me," the Gryffindor boy said with a shake of his head. "Not from what I'd seen in the last week. Not... not this bad, I didn't think, but... distant. Quiet. Not openly affectionate, like my parents. Not like I feel happy people are, but not as unhappy as I think people can be."

Severus snorted, scrunching his nose at the thought.

"What _is_ normal for happy people, anyway?" he asked, rhetorically, because he was so very tired, emotionally exhausted, maybe, and fuck it, for all the hatred and anger and, yes, fear, that he held towards Lupin, there was no one else that he could talk to about this, and for Lily's sake, he didn't dare pack it up and put it out of his mind like he'd done with everything else that had ever bothered him, because Dumbledore had taught him better in those months of meetings, had taught him that there was no such thing as 'out of his mind' when it came to emotions, and he still felt like he was tiptoeing on eggshells around Lily, still felt like their friendship was hanging by a thin little thread, one that he had to preserve above all else, and doing _anything_ to make himself even more incompetent, if perhaps less clumsy and awkward, in helping her, or Merlin forbid making himself inconsiderate or volatile when she needed him to be attentive and put together – that was out of the question.

He hated that it was Remus _fucking_ Lupin sitting next to him, holding Lily's hand, but at least Severus was _here_ , with Lily asleep in his arms and a hope he couldn't pack away no matter how much he tried, because it was the only thing getting him through, that silver doe that would never, ever lose her shine.

"I don't know," Lupin answered. "I don't think there is such a thing."

It was, in a way, a relief to believe that; if there was no normal, if there was no _standard_ , then maybe this would turn out all right in the end.

"Snape."

When Severus looked at Lupin, there was a frightening amount of earnestness on the other boy's face that he had no idea what to do with; it had him instantly on alert, because nothing good would ever come of that look, especially not on Lupin's face. "I am truly sorry for what happened in February. I had no idea that Sirius could even think to do something like that, and I'm sorry that he got off so lightly on it. I've never, ever wanted–"

"But you almost did," Severus overrode him, anger rising up like a tide to compensate for the fear that gripped his chest. When it was about Lily, he could put away the fact that Lupin was a werewolf, but not when the boy himself was bringing it up like this, when those terrifying memories of that night fought to rise to the surface and his fear didn't think it important that the moon was new and that he was safe for the moment. "You think it makes a difference, that you _didn_ _'_ _t want_?" he sneered. "That you–"

"No," Lupin interrupted him, and Severus' mouth shut with an audible smack of teeth against teeth. "I understand that it doesn't, but there is little more I can do about it than apologise."

"You could have made them stop. You could have made them stop any time in the last _year_ , but all you ever did was pretend it wasn't happening. You're not apologising for that, though, are you? No, of course not; you only apologise for things that you know you're not directly responsible for."

"I'm sorry for that, too." The words were soft but assured, tearing the wind right out of Severus' proverbial sails. "Whatever else is between us, I should have had the... the courage, the integrity, to stop them before they escalated it to this point. I wish I could go back and stop them, I do, and I'm paying for it more dearly then I think I can, so I... I won't let you step over that, too. You shouldn't have escalated things either, from the very beginning, and you shouldn't have listened to Sirius about the Whomping Willow and the passage, so don't pretend that you're any more the innocent, blameless victim in this than I am. I won't let you."

"You won't _let_ me?"

"No," and this time, the word was said with such firmness as Severus had never seen or heard from Lupin. "No, I won't. You despise me, and I detest you, and that's not likely to change, but for Lily, you and I will have to find some common ground, and I'm willing to go a long way towards that, but by God, I will not be the one to go all the way. You have to do your own part in it, too, unless you'd rather she be upset with us and have to constantly choose."

Severus ground his teeth, imagining for a long moment what it would be like to say everything that he ever thought to Lupin's face. The fact that the other boy was right only grated on already sore spots.

The problem _was_ that he was right. And there was no working around that, so much as Severus wished.

"Fine," he said through gritted teeth. The _last_ thing he ever wanted to do was play nice with Lupin, but for Lily, he'd do anything, even that. He'd promised her civility. He could do congeniality, too, if it was what she needed, especially now. "Don't _ever_ mention that to me again."

"Very well," Lupin agreed. "But then you can't use that against me anymore, either. It was as much my fault as it was yours," he spoke over the first words of Severus' objection with as much care as Lily usually did, which only served to frustrate him even more. "I drop it, you drop it. With me. How you deal with the others is your business."

"Right," Severus answered, infusing his words with as much sarcasm as he could.

"If you haven't noticed, I am _persona non grata_ for them currently," Lupin responded in a tight voice filled with brittleness he tried to hide and couldn't. Apparently, whatever had happened between him and the other Marauders, it was far bigger than Severus had thought it. He'd thought Lily was exaggerating; apparently not. "I don't feel very invested in defending their actions to anyone."

Lily mumbled something and shifted a little against Severus' chest, and his eyes fell to her fingers still tangled with Lupin's. Victory turned to ashes in his mouth.

"So Lily's a substitute for those cretins you called friends? They don't want you, so you're cosying to her instead? I won't let you use her because you don't have the spine to–"

"Why? Because you're the one already filling that role?"

"Shut up!"

"Is that it, then? Your other _friends_ don't give two shits about you, do they? Where were they when Sirius and James went after you? That last time, when they–"

He fell silent with a startled twitch just as Severus was reaching his absolute boiling point and was preparing to shake off the nuisance weight on his chest to hit Lupin.

Said nuisance weight shifted and moaned, and it hit him suddenly that he was _this close_ to actually pushing _Lily_ off of himself. Sleeping Lily, who had trusted him enough to fall asleep in his arms. Ice suffused his veins at how close he'd come to messing it all up again, and just when she'd started trusting him and relying on him for something as hugely important as emotional support. He'd almost messed it all up, because he'd let Lupin rile him up with two sentences. Because he didn't control his anger.

Breathing heavily, Severus reached for everything Dumbledore had taught him about Occlumency; compartmentalisation was the key, and he needed that now, needed to put away everything that Lupin could use to hurt him. The magic within him was easy to reach after all these years, but the mental process of packing away the memory of that awful day and dampening the bitter acid of his anger not nearly so. In fact, it was harder than he'd ever found it to be whilst practicing with the Headmaster. He couldn't ground himself enough to slip past the anger, couldn't find the one thing that he could use to focus away from everything he wanted put away.

He tried anyway. If he could do it with focus, he could do it without; he'd managed to produce a corporeal Patronus at the age of sixteen, before all his classmates, in spite of all the hatred and anger and resentment that he felt. By comparison, this was nothing, absolutely nothing.

So, slowly but steadily, not letting himself think too much about the effort, Severus forced the memory down, down, down, into the dark corners of his psyche, and used his magic to keep it submerged, building instead a slimy bubble of disquiet and misery and Lily's absolving forgiveness as a shield, for himself against himself, a different shield than any he'd ever made before but the best he could do right now.

The anger lessened with that memory safely stored away, and he could focus more easily on tidying up his mind from the rest, the stinging self-deprecation at knowing his concept of friendship was somehow wrong and twisted, and Lupin's seemingly sincere apology that only served to remind him of all the times that a single word, no matter how sincere, could never atone, and the stomach-cramping fear that Lupin's words were true, that Lily was a crutch, a lifeboat, a desperate attempt to not be completely alone in the world.

She _wasn_ _'_ _t_. The silver doe was proof that what Severus felt for her was more, was better, was pure. The silver doe was that part of himself that belonged to Lily, completely, absolutely, and it was probably the only good part of him, the only clean and innocent part of him, however small, and selfishly, he refused to see it as anything other than what it was – he loved Lily, like he didn't think anyone ever loved another person, and nothing else mattered.

He wished the stupid restriction on underage magic didn't exist, or that he was half a year older than he was, because he wanted desperately to conjure the silver doe and run his fingers down her quicksilver snout, to reach for her and let her help him find that inner calm he'd not known until his training to learn the Patronus charm.

The best he could do was remember, and he knew how to do that; it helped, too, that Lily was a warm weight in his arms, anchoring him to the good and keeping him from slipping back towards that well of negativity he'd been drowning in for years and years.

"Lily is my friend," Lupin said, far more quietly than he'd been speaking previously. Severus thought the other boy had probably forgotten that Lily was there, too. "Perhaps she is my only friend, and I treasure her for it. I won't let you sully that."

"I won't let you hurt her."

"I think that's up to her."

Severus hissed in frustrated disagreement; the anger that he thought he should feel at those words wasn't quite there, and it left him off balance. Occlumency was working, but he'd not thought of the fact that he didn't quite know how to answer these sorts of attacks without the anger driving him on.

"I could say the same thing to you, Snape."

"I would _never_ –"

"You did," Lupin interrupted him. "You called her a 'Mudblood' in front of half the school, when she was trying to help you. If you think that was–"

"No," he whispered, closing his eyes against what he couldn't escape. The shields held, though, and that was a relief, because he couldn't deal with reliving that horrid day, not again so soon. "What I did was unforgivable."

"But she forgave you, and I choose to trust her judgment. So why can't you trust her judgment about my friendship with her?"

"Because you're Dark, and she's..."

He could almost feel Lupin flinch through Lily's arm at his words.

"I can't help that," the boy said, desperation dripping from his words. "You are Dark, too; you even invent Dark Magic, so why are you worthy of her if I'm not?"

"I'm not."

"But you won't let her go, either."

"No, I..."

"Snape, I get that you hate me and that you're afraid of me, I do." The laugh that followed was filled with self-deprecation and self-hatred, with misery, and with his eyes closed, Severus couldn't not hear it, so much as he wanted to. Like always recognised like. "But Lily is the one person in my life who's never looked at me or treated me differently for who I am, and she's never wanted to use that secret either, against me or to her own gain. She's my best friend. I'm not letting her go, no matter what you throw at me. I've never fought for anything in my life, but I'll fight for this. So either you accept that and we find a way of coexisting as her friends, or you'll have one hell of a fight on your hands, and I'm not sure Lily would appreciate that."

And the worst thing about it was that all those words Severus could taste on his own tongue, because they were his truth, too. Lily had always been his friend, no matter the state of his clothes, the colour of his bruises, the nastiness of his tongue, the dysfunction of his family. She may have used his emotions to manipulate him in the last two years, but Severus had to believe that she'd not done it on purpose, not done it to hurt him, and she'd made amends for it. She'd forgiven him something that he didn't know how she could ever forgive.

With bad grace, his face pulling in distaste, he told the sandy-haired werewolf boy: "For Lily."

As much as he disliked it (hated it, really), the words felt final, like his signature on a contract. Like it or not, he'd committed to this, and those words bound him more tightly to it than even an Unbreakable Vow ever could.

* * *

 **A/N:** I will leave any behind-the-scenes explanation for this storyline thread for another chapter (probably the interlude, since that one will be short and I can balance the total word count), but for those who wish to hear my thinking as I decided on this particular turn of events, I promise to give one to you.

And to lift everyone's spirits, over on AO3, there are a few pics of Archimedes the Owl and Madam Mim the Cat (and their fictional counterparts) posted with this chapter of my story. The work number is 5803846.


	25. Ch II,22: To Escape the Inevitable

**A/N:** Just to clarify one thing, in case some were worried (it was mentioned in the previous chapter's reviews): there will be NO Severus/Lily/Remus OT3. Snily is basically my only ship for HP fandom (I suppose that would make it my OTP, except I honestly don't think they would ever have worked in canon) and while I have general opinions on all kinds of other HP pairings, on the spectrum from 'really like it' (e.g. Sirius/Remus) to 'detest it from the bottom of my heart' (absolutely Ron/Hermione), Severus/Lily is the one that I truly love. Ergo, this story is going to be Snily eventually (when the characters are ready for the relationship; we're getting closer!). There might be some degree of romance with other characters for either of them in the meantime, but a) it'll be only temporary, have faith in me, I would not be selling this story with a falsehood, and b) at no point will there be a three-way relationship between them and anyone else.

But that said, Remus as Lily's friend is here to stay, and not only is this necessary for the overarching plot (Remus is now the link that'll be bringing the change started by Lily and Severus in Part I to the Marauders in Part III), it's also very important for Severus' character evolution and thus his and Lily's relationship.

* * *

 **Chapter 22: To Escape the Inevitable**

Lily startled awake into pitch darkness, feeling hot and achy, with her face crusty from tears and her immediate surroundings cramped. Swallowing, she held herself perfectly still as she got her bearings, realising with a sluggish numbness to her thoughts that something sharp was moving through her hair. Wincing a little, she extended her hand up, up over the ground, until her fingers touched softness, and her ears filled with a strange little trilling sound.

 _Oh,_ she thought to herself dumbly, _right, Archimedes._

The little owl she'd purchased that morning – and was it really less than a day that she'd been laughing with Remus and telling him about her favourite childhood film? – was grooming her hair, apparently. When he realised she was awake, he released a quiet but more familiar hoot, that reminded her of nothing so much as a horse's whinny, and walked gangly over into her field of vision, where she could run her fingers gently through his fluffy feathers.

She wiggled the fingers of her other hand and found that they were locked tightly with someone else's. She had to blink past stinging, swollen eyelids a few times, but she finally caught sight of the lanky black hair half-covering a familiar, lovely face of her best friend, relaxed in sleep in a way that made her breath catch in her throat. She'd not seen Severus asleep in years; she'd forgotten how often he scowled or grimaced at every moment of his life, how rigidly he held himself normally. Like this, relaxed in sleep, there was an innocent handsomeness to his features that made her want to run her hands over his cheekbones and eyebrows and the ridge of his nose (his eyes and lips, too, but that really was far too intimate, and Lily didn't think it).

Shifting in her spot, she leaned back, pressing firmly into something very warm and slightly knobby, and in response, that something shuffled a bit too, followed by a loud exhalation. Remus. They were back to back, and he too was asleep.

Pulling her hand away from Severus', Lily shifted to her back, and Archimedes, his sharp talons making her wince for a moment as he hopped up onto her chest, apparently quite happy to momentarily roost between her breasts, big yellow eyes gleaming in the darkness as he observed her.

"Bet this wasn't what you thought it would be when you met me this morning," Lily whispered to her new pet, wiping away the crusty residue of her tears off her face with one hand. She felt hollow, wrung out. The first blast wave had passed, and in her sleep, she'd managed to distance herself enough that she no longer felt the urge to cry and cry and cry. It didn't change much else, though; her family had fallen apart, and nothing was ever going to be okay again. She didn't know what to do, where to turn. Whatever holding pattern things had been in until now, tense and unsaid as they'd been in the last weeks, that was broken now, and she knew it wouldn't be put back together the same way. Whatever her father had done, whatever her mother had known, it didn't matter anymore, because now it was all of them, Lily and Petunia in it too, and there was no going back.

Severus shifted to her right, shuffling a bit closer.

"Lily? Go back to sleep," he murmured, sounding still mostly asleep. His fingers trailed up her arm and tangled in the hem of her sleeve. She didn't think it had even registered with him.

"What time is it?"

"Late."

She snorted quietly and felt Remus turn over on her other side.

"You awake?" he asked, sighing softly.

"Can't sleep anymore."

There was something ethereal, something that felt almost sacred, about the place she was in right now, under the stars, with two sleeping boys protecting her from either side, and the warm little weight of a bird on her chest. She didn't want to fall back asleep and miss it, though her eyes stung and her body and soul demanded rest.

"Do Mum and Dad know we're here?"

"Mhm," Remus voiced, his eyes still closed. "Went to tell them. Snape watched over you."

"You didn't burn everything down," she muttered, mind sluggish.

"We have an understanding," Severus replied, rubbing his nose lightly into her shoulder, as if he had an itch. "Are you okay?"

"Better. Sorry for crying all over you."

"You can always cry all over me," he replied. Sighing, Lily leaned her head to the side until their foreheads were touching and breaths mingling, and closed her eyes. She reached out with her opposite hand until Remus tangled his fingers with hers, and she finally felt safe enough to try and forget until morning.

* * *

Lily found her mother in the kitchen, standing over the sink filled with what looked like clean dishes. The cupboard doors were open and gaping empty, and the kitchenware was spread out all over the room in various neat piles.

Archimedes trilled softly in her hold, his whole tiny body shaking against her chest, and it was his sounding that brought Monica out of her trance. Lily placed her owl on the closest chair back, and then crossed over the room to hug her mother tightly. She returned the embrace with desperation that Lily had never seen from her, and it made Lily's chest ache.

"I'm so sorry, Mum."

"It's all right, Lily. It'll be all right."

Pulling away, Lily shook her head. "Don't pretend, please. It won't."

"We'll sort it all out, your father and I."

"Mum..." Licking her lips, Lily took both of her water-pruned hands in her own. "Mum, have you been happy, before this?"

"Happy enough."

"That's not the same thing as just happy," Lily countered quietly. "Did you know?"

Monica turned away from her and back to the sink, grabbing hold of the sponge to start vigorously scrubbing a pan that by all accounts had been clean from the start.

"Where did you spend the night? Your friend came to tell us, and he insisted that we leave you in peace. I've thought him a nice young man, but now I'm–"

"Mum, don't change the subject," Lily cut her off. "Did you know?"

Monica smacked her hands down into the sudsy water.

"What do you want me to say, Lily? Did I know about her? Did I know that he's wanted to leave me for months, maybe years? Did I know my whole life was a sham?"

"Any of it. All of it," Lily countered. "What _did_ you know? Dad said you've been having problems for a very long time. What problems, Mum?"

"I don't know, Lily. Your father... things changed for him, apparently. What we had was no longer enough. Men go through that, the mid-life crisis. Rejecting good positions at prestigious universities and insisting on marital counselling, never being happy and wanting a new life."

Lily opened her mouth, but hesitated, remembering the boys' suggestion to speak with her father about the whole situation properly too. Her mother was obviously not willing to speak about this now, and Lily didn't feel confident enough prodding her, because she didn't know what had even happened between her parents in the last year or two. Her mother had mentioned counselling, and that by itself was news to Lily. Petunia had written in that letter a few months back that their father had passed up a position at University of Bristol, but he was obviously more interested in the position at Victoria University of Manchester, so it wasn't simply about moving away from Cokeworth.

"Who wrote to you?" her mother asked, switching the subject while Lily was pondering over what to do.

"Huh?"

"The owl, dear. Is it one of the girls?"

"What? Oh, no, Archimedes is mine, I bought him yesterday in Manchester."

"You didn't tell me you were looking for a new pet."

"I wasn't; we just stopped by the store to see what they had. I saw him, and decided that I really wanted him. Severus will bring his stuff over later, the cage and all that; it was shrunk so he has to enlarge it at his place first."

"Lily, about your friends – perhaps it would be better if Remus were to go home early."

"Oh! I..." Startled, Lily's heart picked up its rhythm at the thought of losing one of her biggest supports so far. On the one hand, she knew that it was the right decision, because this was a family matter and having an outsider witness it was inappropriate on so many levels; on the other, though, she didn't want Remus to go. Severus wouldn't be welcome in the house either, no doubt, and she couldn't even imagine being alone in here with her parents warring over this and with Petunia's hostilities going back to their initial levels, which they no doubt would, since this was their main cause in the first place. "I'll talk with him about it," she promised vaguely, trying to buy time to think this through a bit more.

She left her mother to her obsessive cleaning and found her father in his study, looking wan and sad, though his eyes lit up with muted hope when he saw it was Lily who'd knocked. She deposited Archimedes on the little bird perch that usually hosted her _Daily Prophet_ delivery owls each morning, and her little bird settled back into sleep with hardly a trill.

"A new pet?" her father asked.

"Archimedes. I got him yesterday in Boggart Hole."

"He's lovely."

"Mhm. You and Mum let me stay out all night."

Stephen shrugged.

"Monica wasn't for it, of course; in this case, I chose to put my foot down. Remus was right, you needed time and rest, and you wouldn't have gotten it in the house last night. I trust both him and Severus to look out for you, and unlike your mother, I am not hung up on you all being teenagers. You're mature enough that if there is something going on with you and one of them, I trust you to be smart about it. Besides, you'll be an adult in less than six months, by your society's standards, and I won't have much of a say then, anyway. Did it help?"

"Yes, it did," Lily answered truthfully. "Thank you. I'm ready to talk now."

Her father immediately turned away from his desk and invited her to sit on the armchair, which she did, curling up with her feet beneath herself and her knees close to her chest. That revulsion she'd felt yesterday when she'd looked at him was gone; in its place was hurt and disappointment that she had never thought she'd feel towards him, and her insides ached with the need of relieving those feelings, of soothing them away.

She didn't know if it was possible after yesterday and his broader actions, but Lily found herself wanting desperately to try, and feeling young and stupid and little about it, too.

But that was all right; if her turbulent friendship with Severus and the last three months had taught her anything, it was that the relationships with the people who mattered the most were worth all the sense of foolishness and discomfort they caused her.

"You said you and Mum have had problems. When did that start?"

"She and I would not agree on this, but for me, the issues started around the time we learned that you are a witch. So, about six years now."

"That long?" Lily breathed out.

"Not in the way you're thinking," her father cut her off. "We had one of our bigger arguments about you going to Hogwarts. You'd been saying that you're a witch for a couple of years by that point, ever since you and Severus became friends, but to be honest, I didn't truly believe it until Professor McGonagall demonstrated. I didn't want you going to that school; Monica insisted it would be better for you."

"But why? I mean, I wanted to go, and I would have needed to learn to control my magic either way."

"After all this time, it's really not very important. I felt that you would be too isolated from us, that you'd not be able to go to university. You know I'd always wanted you to push your education as far as you could."

"There are masteries in magic, too, Dad," Lily pointed out.

"As I said, it's really unimportant now. You went to Hogwarts, that's that. But that's when it started for me, when I realised that I was not satisfied with my life anymore. It's not something that bothered me much for a long while. You'll understand once you start working; the daily grind is a very powerful force. You get lulled into your routine, get comfortable in it, don't consider it too much. For a while, I thought it would pass, that it's just what happens with middle age."

"Mum said you're having a mid-life crisis."

"Perhaps she's right," Stephen answered with a small shrug. "I certainly don't believe so, but then I would hardly be capable of being objective about such an assessment."

"So why have you been dissatisfied?"

"Because after you'd left for Hogwarts, I realised that I have no one to truly speak with in the house. Not the little everyday things, of course, the weather and our obligations and the news. Intellectual conversation, about politics, about the society, about history and books and all those other things. I realised at one point that I preferred to stay on campus and debate the curriculum I taught with my students, or in outings with other professors. I missed you constantly asking me about things, missed listening to your fervour over everything and anything that crossed your mind. Monica and I had had such conversations in the beginning of our relationship, but they'd tapered off some time around when Petunia and you were born, and I'm afraid Monica's interests shifted until they became misaligned with mine."

"But it's just conversation, Dad. How can that replace love?"

"You've not been in a serious relationship yet, Lily; it'll be more understandable to you when you are. Emotions are largely easy; you feel or you don't, and there isn't much you can do to force yourself either way. Relationships are a constant forging and reforging of connections between yourself and the other person. A lot of people don't realise it – I certainly didn't when Monica and I married – but the work never stops. Marriage isn't some sort of magical stasis charm that will preserve your feelings and your connection. Romantic relationships are just like any other kind of relationship, they require work. And people change. You've changed a lot between last year and this, and it took me a little while to catch on. And for every change that happens to you, that will be reflected on all your relationships to one extent or another."

Yes, Lily was finding this to be far truer than she could ever have thought before. "So how did you change?"

"I became lonely, in this house, with Monica. I craved a connection that went beyond basic emotion, beyond just love that we share, and when I tried to let her know, she didn't seem to understand. For her, what we had was more than enough, and every time I tried to seek more from her and didn't get it, it felt more and more like a pointless endeavour. So I found myself connecting to people at work instead, going out to university functions, organising more seminars, taking over a bigger share of the research, while at home, I became content to just share space and... not engage. And in doing this, I was messing up more than just my marriage with Monica, I was also messing up my relationship with you girls."

"What do you mean?" Lily asked with a frown, head swirling from what her father had told her so far, and instinctively shying away from the suggestion that she was somehow involved with her parents' relationship failing.

"I'd barely manage to wait for you to come home for the holidays, because of our time together. I missed that as much as I missed you, always, and of course, you always came back with new ideas and new tales about this world that you were a part of and that was a part of you, and I always wanted to hear more, not only because I wanted to know what sort of life we'd allowed you to work towards, but also simply because it was interesting and new, and it called on the academic in me. Petunia picked up on it, though I'd not realised this for a very long time. She is so perceptive, it's a shame she doesn't seem to have an interest in challenging herself."

"She takes after Mum," Lily murmured, remembering her grandmother saying that more than once. "I take after you, and she takes after Mum."

"I suppose that's truer than simply in looks. She caught on to it, and she felt that it was further proof we were favouring you over her, and she took it out on you. I should have seen her insecurities years ago, though; I should have seen how my actions were impacting her, and by extension your relationship with her. And it wasn't fair to you either, Lily, to expect you to somehow take Monica's place in a role that was so very important to me, or to encourage your belief that it wasn't damaging us all to collectively focus so much on your schooling and magic in general."

"So, where does that woman come in? When did that start?"

Stephen sighed. "You have to understand, Lily – Jocasta is my close friend first, before anything else. What romantic connection we had was very brief, a product of circumstance that led me to seek comfort and solace in a very difficult time in my marriage. We both regret it; she detests that her actions hurt my family, Monica first and then you two girls by proxy, and I hurt for having caused pain with it, for breaking your mother's trust and faith in me. I am ashamed for how it came about, and what kind of person it makes me, in your eyes and my own."

"But you said you love her."

"I do," he confirmed, with deep regret on his face. "As I said, you cannot influence how you feel, you can only influence what you do. I know you want me to regret my feelings for her, and I am sorry that I cannot, for our sake. I would sacrifice almost anything so that you and Petunia would not hate me, that your love for me and your relationship with me would not be in danger. I suggested visiting a family therapist to Monica when I first realised that I could no longer connect to her at the level I needed to, and she felt hurt by the suggestion that I was unhappy with her, so we left it at that initially. Jocasta was the one who insisted that I had to push the issue if I wanted to save the marriage. She was the first to point out to me – and she was right – that I gave into your mother too much, on all levels. I found it too... tiring, too much effort, to fight for the things I wanted when I so rarely got any of them anyway, and the more our relationship became on her terms, the more reluctant I was to contradict her. So after Jocasta and I agreed that we could not carry on our relationship as we had for those couple of weeks – and it really was only a little bit more than two weeks, two years ago, I swear this is the truth, Lily," he stated fervently, as if wishing to press the truth of his words into Lily's very heart, "– I finally admitted to myself that things weren't working as they should, and I tried to fix it."

"Did you try counselling in the end?"

"For a couple of months about a year ago. It didn't take; Monica didn't feel that our relationship was anyone else's business, and she didn't think that an outsider such as a licenced therapist could give any real suggestion or advice on how we are with each other. That trip we took, for Easter last year, that was my attempt to help us reconnect away from our everyday routine. I really did try, for almost a year after my... dalliance... with Jocasta, but ever since we stopped counselling... I don't think that there is anything left on which to work in our marriage, Lily, and to start over... even if I were up to it, which I don't think I am anymore, I don't believe Monica understands the need for it, or perhaps she refuses to see it. I don't think I understand what's going on in her mind anymore, and that's what hurts me the most, to be honest. I feel like we've grown into strangers, and I don't know how to overcome that."

"So, you're giving up?" Lily asked sadly, biting her lip. "That's it?"

Exhaling, Stephen leaned back in his chair and rubbed a hand over his face.

"I will be honest with you, love; the relationship your mother and I had in your youth, that's gone, and I don't see it coming back. But this isn't just about our marriage, this is also about our family, and that includes you and Petunia. I know what sort of stigma goes with the concept of divorce for children in the non-magical world; I don't know how this might impact you in the wizarding world. But, I want to take that into account, maybe primarily that."

"What are you saying, Dad?"

"I'm saying... well, I'm saying that if you and Petunia cannot handle an outright divorce, then your mother and I will find some other arrangement that will suit us all."

Lily's mouth dropped open, and she leaned back in her chair in shock. Her first thought was that all her anguish, from the moment she'd seen her father holding hands with that woman, to right now, was all unnecessary, because they'd not even divorce if only Petunia and Lily asked them not to. And the urge to ask him to give up this idea was so strong Lily could taste the words on her tongue, her heart beating wildly at the thought that she could save their family, she could just say the word and all this would be behind them, just a nightmare from which they'd woken up, just–

But then she met her father's eyes, and the words tasted suddenly of ashes in her mouth, because she could see that he was expecting her to do it, he was already trying to prepare himself for failure and disappointment, trying to come to terms with an existence he must have thought unbearable, if he was willing to divorce. And she remembered, too, her resolution that she would not claim and dictate the acts of others, that she would not use them to her own benefit – and who would truly be the one getting something out of them staying together? Their mother, maybe, if she was truly so desperate to keep to how things had been going; but Lily and Petunia would be moving out sooner rather than later, Petunia was already eighteen and Lily would be seventeen in six months, both adults and both looking to find their own place in the world, and when they left, it'd just be Stephen and Monica, alone, and Lily's father already looked like he could barely stand it.

And what about her mother, in the first place? Monica's feelings were far more important to Lily right now than Stephen's, because he was the one who'd cheated, and he was the one who'd started this all, and just as importantly, he was the one who was the breadwinner, the one who brought money into the home. Lily's mother was the one who'd be left on her own, a homemaker for twenty plus years and with her belief that her job was that of the wife and the mother and the woman of the household.

"What about Mum?" she asked her father, licking her lips. "If you divorce, what happens to her?"

"We've not spoken about that, but as far as I'm concerned, she can have the house, and of course she'd get alimony."

"And you?"

"The job in Manchester is better paid, and I'd only require a small flat with an extra room for you and Petunia."

"And what about _her_? If you divorce Mum, would you get back together with her?"

Her father closed his eyes and sighed wearily. "I honestly haven't considered that, Lily. I have not even made peace with coming to this decision yet, and my marriage is such an enormous part of my life, my existence... I cannot think any further than this." He rubbed his upper lip over the bristles of his beard right under his lower lip, then looked up, and Lily was struck for the first time by the fact that her father was heartbroken, was genuinely, truly heartbroken about everything. "I have loved your mother since I was twenty-six years old, and I will love her until I die. The way I love her may have changed, but the emotion itself is there and will be forever. This is... tearing me up inside. I am destroying our family with this, everything you girls have known, everything Monica and I have struggled to build for the past two and a half decades. But I truly believe that it is the best decision, for everyone. Please, try to understand, love."

Lily swallowed past the lump in her throat and nodded. She could try, though she couldn't promise anything more than that, because she didn't know how she felt, now that she'd heard the whole story. Was her mother so hard to reach, so set in her own views, that her father was willing to give up after more than twenty-five years of effort? Lily's stomach turned, because she knew how that must have felt – she'd gone through something similar in the last half-year, hadn't she, though in her case it was her best friend, and not her spouse, and it was seven years and not twenty plus. But the sense of failure, the sense of hopelessness and exhaustion, those all she knew very well.

And how was she to reconcile that with the fact her father had been unfaithful? Her daddy, her hero, who'd won her a stuffed toy panther bigger than herself at the fair when she was three, who'd helped her rescue her kitten from the deluge when she was five, who'd taught her to read and who'd witnessed her first deliberate spell, who'd held her when she'd cried and who'd supported her when she was desperate, who'd _always_ made time for her and had always been infinitely interested in everything she had to say. He had _cheated_ , was still cheating emotionally if not physically, and it horrified her every time it intruded into her thoughts.

"Have you talked with Petunia about all this?"

"Some of it," Stephen answered. "She was there for some of the bigger events in the past few years, so I think she was half-way expecting it. But she's currently not willing to listen to me, not after I told her about Jocasta. I am hoping that she'll calm down in a few days, and I'll try to explain it to her, too."

"And if I asked you not to do it, if I... if I asked you to stay, you would?"

Sliding out of his chair, her father knelt by her side and took her hands in both of his.

"Lilyflower, I _love_ you. I love you more than I've ever loved anything in my life. You are my baby girl, my child, a part of me in ways that no one but you and Petunia can be. I am _not_ leaving you. Come September, Petunia will move down to London for her courses, and in another year, you too will start finding your own way in life. But you're not leaving me and your mother, neither one of you, just like I won't be leaving you. Your mother and I won't live in the same place anymore, and you'll have to split your time to visit us instead of seeing us together, but you will _always_ have a place in my heart and in my home and in my life, always. The relationship we share as a family is not the same thing as the relationship you and I share; we won't be a family in that way anymore, but we will always be father and daughter. I am _not_ leaving you, I promise."

"But you're leaving Mum," Lily whispered, finding her lips trembling and tears spilling over her still tender eyelids. Her father swallowed, blinking his own tears out of his eyes, and pulled her into a tight, warm hug, and this time, Lily couldn't find it in herself to pull away, as she let her tears silently fall to wet his shirt.

"I wish I could say that I wasn't," he whispered into her hair, "I wish that I could stand before you with her and say that it was a joint decision, that we are leaving each other. I truly do. But someone has to make the first move, and she never will, so I must be the one." He rocked her slightly, like he'd done when she was very little, and Lily pretended that none of this was real, that she'd woken up from a nightmare and he was telling her that it was all right.

But she couldn't do it for more than a moment or two, because it was never going to be all right again.

"Yes," her father said. "If you ask it of me, then I'll drop the whole thing, try again. For you."

A choked sob ripped from Lily's chest, and it almost came out as a hiccough, muffled into his shoulder. It hurt, but she shook her head.

"I don't know, Dad. I don't know what to do."

"Think," he advised her. "Let yourself process it. I'll give you all the time you need, love, and you need to do the same. Talk to your mum, to Petunia. Nothing has to be decided this instant."

Lily nodded, rubbing her cheek against the cotton of his shirt in a soothing, repetitive motion. Then, after a bit, when she was feeling slightly calmer, she pulled back and accepted her father's handkerchief to wipe her cheeks and nose with.

"Mum wants me to send Remus away."

"And what do you want?"

"I want him to stay. He and Sev, they... they took care of me yesterday. I don't want to be alone with this. I don't... I don't want to be _here_." She startled herself with how much all the negativity and vileness that she was feeling came out with that word, that had ripped out of her chest unbidden.

Propping his arms against the handrests of her sofa chair, apparently content to continue kneeling on the floor, her father observed her quietly for a little while. Then he nodded.

"Do you think, if you asked her, that your friend would let you go to her cottage a bit earlier?"

"Clotilde? I don't know; I don't think she can do it before."

"What if you went there with Remus or Petunia? Would she mind letting you two stay there without her?"

Feeling a bit discombobulated, Lily frowned. "What? I don't... You know Petunia wouldn't want to go, Dad."

"The boys, they'd look out for you?"

Bewildered, Lily nodded. "I don't understand, though. What are you suggesting?"

"I'm suggesting that you see with your friend Clotilde if she'd let you have the cottage for the next week if someone else – say, a friend or your sister – came with you, and if she would, then we'll tell your mother that you've moved up your vacation with your girlfriends, and then you, Remus and Severus could go and stay there for the next week."

Lily found herself shaking her head to make sure her hearing was working right.

"You... are you suggesting we lie to everyone so that I could spend a week on the beach with two boys my age and no supervision?"

"Would you need supervision?"

"I'm sixteen. Aren't parents supposed to give curfew and fret over hormones when you're a sixteen-year old girl? Or, or, being taken advantage of by horny boys?"

Her father offered her a wry smile. "Lilyflower, if anyone will be taking advantage, it'll be you taking advantage of those two boys, not the other way around. The way you've got them twisted around, I'm more worried for them coming to blows over you than you ending up pregnant by them."

"Dad, that's not funny. I've not _twisted_ them ar–"

"Oh, love, you really have. Granted, Remus is far less obvious about it than Severus, but those two boys are stupid about you."

"No, Dad, you're completely wrong," she said hurriedly with a shake of her head. "Severus is... well, that's one thing, but Remus lost all his friends last month when he stood up to them for the first time, and he's always been lonely and shy, that's why he's so protective – he doesn't have any other friends except for me."

"Perhaps that's it, then," her father acquiesced, though Lily couldn't quite tell if he'd meant it sincerely or as a platitude. "Either way, even if I don't trust them with you individually, they don't seem to like each other very much, do they."

"More like hate each other," she muttered in agreement.

"Well, then, I can trust them to keep each other in line, if there's a need. And I know how smart you are, Lilyflower; there is no reason you'd do anything stupid at all."

"Lying, though?" she asked, grimacing as two warring feelings rose up at the same time – the powerful yearning for exactly that which her father had suggested, and the disgust at the suggestion of lying coming from someone who had been doing just that for years now, to all of them. "Hasn't there been enough of that in this family?" It was why her question came out less recriminatory than it might have otherwise.

"Yes, there has," Stephen agreed, not even trying to pretend he didn't know what she'd meant. "But the truth is that Monica will not agree to this otherwise; she did not feel very positive about Remus coming for the two weeks in the first place, and she... perhaps shares more of Petunia's opinion of Severus than mine. And sometimes, the lies we tell to protect, either ourselves or others, are important. They aren't right, and they can cost a lot, but so long as you keep that in mind... the world isn't black and white, love. _Nothing_ is good or bad only. You need to remember that when you go into the big wide world."

She _really_ didn't like the lying to her mother, after everything that had happened (she was pretty certain that Clotilde wouldn't mind her bringing Remus with, so she'd immediately decided to tell her the truth – or most of it, anyway). But, the more she thought of it, the more she loved the idea, the escape her father had thought up for her. It was downright seductive, the idea of three weeks away from home instead of two, going swimming with _all_ of her closest friends instead of just the girls, escaping the pain that the word 'home' now brought, at least for a little while.

And getting some distance, too, so that she didn't say something stupid and come to regret it later in life. What her father had offered her, it was... it was _huge_ , it was his life and happiness, and she knew what that meant, knew it because she'd already been offered almost the same thing by Severus, and she'd not been able to handle that either, terrified of messing things up. But at least it meant she knew how important it was to do the right thing.

"Ok. I need to speak with Mum about everything, I want to know her side. And Petunia, too." Actually, she wanted to talk to her sister first. Uncurling from her spot, she stood up and stretched, feeling finally somewhat settled into this new, ugly reality of home. "Sev's going to bring Archimedes' stuff; let him sleep there in the meantime, yeah?" He father nodded, following her lead and standing up, and Lily laid her hand on his forearm gently. "I don't know how to be ok with what you did with that woman, Dad, but I don't want... I don't want us to never be ok again, either, so I'll... I'll try to figure it out. And, thank you, for letting me run away for a bit."

Stephen ran his hand softly over her hair, down to the nape of her neck, and guided her gently closer so that he could place a tender kiss on her forehead.

"Thank you, love, for not thinking me a monster."

"You could never be a monster to me. You're my dad."

She gave him one last sad smile, before walking out in search of her sister, feeling at the same time numb and utterly terrified for what was to come.

* * *

"You stayed out with Snape and Lupin," were Petunia's first words when Lily entered her room and closed the door behind herself.

"Yeah. Did you stay here?"

"Of course. This is my house, and my room, and I'm not getting chased out by anything else happening here," her sister confirmed brusquely.

"So, what do you think? About the divorce?"

"I think that Dad is completely out of his mind," Petunia said bluntly. "I knew they were going in this direction – I knew something like this would happen sooner or later – but the _affair_..." She sniffed, and Lily took a moment to scrutinise her sister's appearance. Though she had as heavy a makeup as was possible to have in these temperatures, Petunia hadn't managed to conceal how swollen her eyelids were, or get rid of all the redness from her eyes.

Sniffing herself, Lily crawled onto Petunia's bed and hugged her. They'd not hugged in years, and it felt awkward, the older girl narrow and bony where Lily last remembered a child's softness, and it took her a moment too long to respond, but she did in the end, wrapping her arms around Lily's waist and squeezing tightly.

All their arguments, all their intolerance, none of it mattered suddenly. All that mattered was that they were there for each other, together in the same circumstances.

"Dad told me about their issues," Lily informed Petunia once they'd finally pulled away from each other. "He said you saw a lot of it?"

"There was a huge row at Christmastime the year you stayed at your school. They'd been out with friends and started fighting when they came back, both half-drunk. I had to scream at them both to get them to stop."

"Oh, T– Petunia, I'm so sorry."

"I bet that's when he did it," Petunia said, viciously tearing a paper tissue to shreds in her lap. "He stayed gone for whole days after that."

Lily's stomach flipped uncomfortably. She didn't want to think about it, didn't want to know the specifics.

"What did you see?" Petunia asked, blue eyes narrowing as they flew up to meet Lily's green. "Yesterday."

"I saw..." Lily licked her lips, bit the lower one lightly. "I saw them walk out together. He... he took her hands and kissed them, and then she... she kissed his cheek, but it was – it was right at the corner of his mouth, where his beard starts. Then she got in a taxi, and he saw me."

"I _knew it_. I knew they weren't over."

"I don't... I don't know. I don't think he'd need to lie to us about that. I mean, it'd be different if I'd not seen them, but–"

"Of course it makes sense, Lily, don't be stupid. He wants sympathy. He wants to win us to his side."

"But Mum doesn't seem to think their troubles were anything but him having some sort of mid-life crisis," Lily objected. "That's ridiculous, it doesn't fit at all with how serious he says it was."

"And you'd trust him over Mum?"

" _I don_ _'_ _t know_ what Mum thinks," Lily repeated, "because she won't say anything but that it's a mid-life crisis. I'll try to talk to her again later, now I can ask her specifics, but I can't trust her about something she's given me absolutely nothing at all about!"

"What would she need to give you?! He had an affair!"

"Two years ago, for two weeks! But they're talking about divorcing _now_ , not two years ago."

"That's if he's telling the truth. Meanwhile you saw him kissing that _woman_."

"He said it was a, a by-product, a symptom of their problems, that she isn't why he's doing this. He said he and Mum are like strangers living together."

"He's never content with anything," Petunia muttered, shaking her head. "That's his problem, you know. He's never content with what he's got."

Lily shook her head, but didn't say anything to that. She herself didn't think that was it at all, and even if it was, what was wrong with wanting more out of your life with another person, if it was forever? She'd wanted more out of her relationship with Severus, and with Petunia, too, enough to do something about that. If she hadn't, where would she have been now? Forever finished with her best friend, and probably still fighting with her sister without even knowing why.

"T– Petunia, would you be ok here if I left for my seaside holiday a week sooner? Mum suggested that Remus should probably go home, and Sev is going for some special training anyway, and I'd... rather not be here just now."

"Why wouldn't I be all right with that? It's your own life, Lily."

"Yes, but with everything that's happened, and if they decide to really go ahead with it... Dad will have to move out, and there will be talk of splitting stuff and solicitors and all of that ugliness... I can stay, if you want me to."

Petunia studied her for a moment, before apparently coming to a conclusion and decisively shaking her head.

"No, you go if– you go. I'm fine."

"What will you do?" Lily asked guiltily.

"What I've been doing all along – supervise."

* * *

Archimedes proved his worth that very evening, when he enthusiastically accepted the letter and flew assuredly westwards, returning mid-day even though he looked about ready to drop into a deep sleep. Clotilde's response to Lily's plea was a key and a hand-drawn map of how to reach the cottage from the main road, along with instructions about opening the wards. Lily had kept the letter bare, mostly, saying only that her parents were talking of separation and that she wanted to escape the house for a little while and whether Clo would mind her inviting Remus for the week, so that she'd not be alone. Of all her friends, Lily felt the least worry about telling Clotilde; the older girl's parents had never even married, which was why she had her mother's French last name though her father was British, so if anyone would understand what it was like to not live with both parents together, it was her. Lily's limited knowledge on the topic suggested that the wizarding world looked extremely unfavourably on divorce, and she wasn't looking forward to sharing the news with her Pure-blood friends. Even in the Muggle world, divorce was not seen as a positive thing in the least – Lily remembered one girl in her primary whose parents had divorced, and she'd been almost a circus attraction because of it. At least Severus and Remus both had acted as normally as Lily could have ever hoped for, and it made all the difference in the world; she didn't think she could have stood it if they'd pitied her for possibly becoming a child of divorcees.

Getting Remus on board was easy enough; he'd already planned to stay another week, and he didn't much care where he'd spend that week. Severus agreed immediately, but needed a day or two to get his mother to sign off on it, since he was already going to be gone from home for three weeks in August. Convincing Lily's mum was the hardest part of it, and Lily wasn't looking forward to the lying, so much as she knew it was necessary, because even if her dad hadn't pointed out that Monica didn't appear to have too many positive feelings about Lily's male friends, she would have known herself that there was no way her mother would be all right with Lily staying anywhere for a whole week alone with two teenaged boys.

She made sure to repeat the sentences a few times in her head first, just because she knew that she was not very good at outright lying. "Clotilde is already there, and she says that she doesn't mind if I come early," she elaborated on the falsehood to her mother after she'd explained what her intentions were. "Mary and Bettina would then come as scheduled in a week's time."

Monica pinched her lips for a moment. "Oh, dear, must you really?"

"I'm sorry, Mum, but I just... I don't know what to do with myself here."

"I don't, either. I never thought I'd be in this situation."

Lily pulled her gently by the hand to the sofa in the sitting room, where they could talk more comfortably.

"Mum, do you want to stay married to Dad?"

"How can you even ask me that?" Monica asked, voice wavering.

"Dad said you've had problems since before I went to Hogwarts."

"That's absolutely not true, Lily. We had a, a rough patch, two years ago, but things got better after that. Everything was fine until this year, things were completely fine. I don't even know where this came from."

"Dad said you tried family therapy."

"That nonsense. Yes, I tried it, because he wouldn't let it go, but it didn't do anything for us. The therapist kept insisting we needed to work on our communication. There is nothing wrong with our communication, Lily, or there wasn't until this."

"But this isn't sudden, Mum, not the way Petunia says it. It's not... I've known something was wrong since the evening I came home."

"When you've been married for twenty-two years, child, even half a year is sudden enough."

Swallowing, Lily tried to imagine what that could feel like, and failed. She could barely imagine herself at twenty-two, let alone spending that much time with another person.

"Dad said, he said you've not talked things through yet."

"No, not yet, though I expect we will in a few more days." Monica huffed, her face showing all of her hurt for a split second. "He said his hand was forced rather more quickly than he'd wanted it to. Apparently, he hadn't meant to involve you and your sister before he'd spoken with me. But he was planning it, oh, he was."

"What will you do? If... if you do decide to split up?" Lily asked her tentatively. "Will you fight it?"

Her mother sniffed, blinking vigorously a few times. "I don't imagine I will. I'd rather it be quick and quiet than drag it out and... it would be quite undignified, wouldn't it. But I am not leaving our home, and you are not, either, until you find your own places. He'll be the one to leave."

"We wouldn't, Mum," Lily promised, taking her hand in both of hers. "Whatever you and Dad decide in the end, Petunia and I will always be here for you, you know that."

"I know, darling. Oh, I do so love you," her mother said, pulling her gently into a hug, which Lily returned gladly.

"I love you too, Mum."

And she wondered, too, at the way her parents seemed to see this mess differently. It made her anxious, unsettled inside, confused about what was true and what wasn't, and that irritated her because she was feeling torn between loyalties to both of them. It felt like she was expected to choose, and Petunia certainly didn't seem to have a problem with that, but it felt like choosing one side would be betraying the other, and Lily didn't want to be betraying anyone. She didn't want to have to choose a side in this, that wasn't fair.

The house was a suffocating place for that weekend. Monica and Stephen barely spoke, and when they did, it was behind closed doors, where Lily, Petunia or Remus couldn't easily overhear them. Petunia shunned their father wholly, choosing either to hover around their mother, stay shut in her own room, or vanish out of the house with her friend Martine Dalloway. Lily shied away from Stephen as well, though she found that she couldn't stomach being around Monica, either, feeling upset every time she saw that façade of forced indifference on her face. All her further attempts at probing her mother for her feelings on the topic of her marriage ended up the same as the first couple, with Monica seemingly shutting her out and trying to change the subject. It was a coping mechanism, no doubt, but for Lily, who had always been a fiery person with emotions so on the surface that she wasn't even sure how to begin trying to hide or dampen them, it felt alienating in the same way that Petunia's anger had always felt alienating, and as a result created a widening distance between mother and daughter that Lily didn't know what to do with. The clarity that her father had offered in regard to his own views on the failing marriage pulled at Lily, though she recoiled from him again when, in the early hours of Sunday, she wandered down to the living room to try and get some sleep with the assistance of the telly sounds droning in the background, and realised that her father was curled up on the recliner in his study where he'd taken to sleeping for the last couple of days, the guest bedroom being already occupied by Remus, speaking softly on the phone to only one possible person, and speaking in tones that left Lily feeling tied into knots.

She doubted him, doubted him on everything every time she spoke with Petunia, who seemed convinced that he was lying to them. She struggled to find ways of comprehending her mother in this whole mess, to connect to her. She analysed each and every moment of the summer hols for more and more clues about how things had fallen apart, clues that had slipped her by because she'd had no frame of reference in which to notice them. She thought of the last few holiday seasons, when she'd come home, when they'd gone on holiday together, trying to see what it was that had pushed her father so far away from them, from her mother into the arms of another woman, even as she herself felt the same thing with her mother's stubborn resistance to sharing her internal life with Lily. She exhausted herself with thoughts that went on and on in endless loops she couldn't stop, until Remus joined her and distracted her until she dozed off on the couch next to him.

She cried, because there was a rock on her chest and it made breathing hard, because there was a knot in her throat that made swallowing difficult, because there were cramps in her stomach that wouldn't let her sleep. She cried, because that was the only relief she found – if she cried herself into exhaustion, at least she could sleep, even if it was only to doze on and off for the whole day.

She remembered those first couple of days after Severus hard hurt her, and how utterly destroyed she'd felt. This was worse, somehow; she'd had a target for all her pain and frustration and despondency then, anger that had pushed her through. It had been easy to lay the blame at Severus' feet, at Potter's and his group's, for what had happened. She'd had the security that even though this one part of her life had broken into pieces, all the rest of them were secure. She had none of those things now. She was angry with the situation in an abstract way, but she couldn't seem to grasp the anger at her father that Petunia had, her sadness pure and all-encompassing enough that it muffled all the rest, helped along by her father's utter openness about the whole thing and her mother's contrasting wall of silence. By Sunday evening, she was choking on it, fleeing to her room when Petunia began pressing the topic of solicitors on their mother, where Remus helped her lose herself in magical theory of charms used on flying brooms, and she could block out the voices discussing the dissolution of her family and home life in clinical, legal terms.

On Monday morning at the crack of dawn, Petunia gave Lily and Remus a lift to the Stoke-on-Trent bus station, from which they were supposedly going to take two different buses in two different directions. The horse-faced girl didn't say much, but she did surprise Lily by initiating a fierce, almost desperate hug that Lily returned in equal measure, and that lasted longer than any hug Lily had shared with anyone in recent years.

"You'll call me back if you need me, won't you, Pet?" she asked her big sister with insistence. "And ring me up even if you just want to talk; you have the number."

"Will you do the same, then, Lilian?"

Smiling at the nickname, one that had died with their childhood closeness, Lily pulled away to meet her sister's eyes and nodded.

"I'm not abandoning you, I promise. I'll phone so often you'll get sick of me."

Petunia raised an eyebrow and shook her head.

"It'd be a change from the usual."

"Think you can handle it?"

"I can handle anything, Lily."

It was a sad sort of truth, too – Petunia had complexes that Lily didn't even know how to begin to unpack and she was so rigid that trying to change her was like trying to bring down the Tower of Babylon with one's fists, but she was tough at her core, a survivor; there was probably nothing that would ever break her, not the way that Lily was learning she herself could be broken. And so much as Lily admired her for it, she didn't feel the envy that she'd once felt over it, not anymore, not since that Saturday when she'd broken over how she'd treated her oldest, closest friend, because now she understood that sometimes, only by breaking the existing could something better be put together afterwards, and Petunia's resilience prevented her from experiencing such a thing.

But it still meant that she was more fragile, and where she'd needed to break if she'd wanted to preserve her connection to Severus, she knew that in this instance, she couldn't let herself fold under pressure, even if it meant running away for a little while. Still, knowing that Petunia wasn't angry with her, it helped get her on her way; it helped her feel less guilty for it.

Petunia left them at the station not long after, and Severus arrived on the bus from Cokeworth less than ten minutes later. They'd figured out the best timing to minimise any chance of someone catching on to their little scheme, and it felt good to see those plans unfolding without any stressful hitches.

"You look..."

"Like crap?" Lily finished for her best friend when he stalled.

"I was going to say exhausted," Severus answered with a frown. "How much sleep have you had?"

"I napped through most of yesterday," she said with a shrug, handing him her wide brimmed hat to reset her ponytail, and turning her thoughts as best she could to the promise of the sea. "Your mum didn't make a fuss?"

"No more than expected; is your owl still at my disposal?" He was being circumspect because of Remus being a passive participant in the conversation; all that he'd been willing to tell in the presence of the other boy was that he had other obligations after this week, and that he needed to organise transportation. Lily agreed that it was the smartest option; she trusted Remus, and there was a case to be made about how confusing he was going to find Severus' behaviour during their seaside holiday once they all got back to Hogwarts and Severus resumed his association with the Junior Death Eaters, but she was not willing to risk Severus' safety on that conviction. Remus could speculate, but without any concrete hints as to the Slytherin's true role in the coming months and years, he would only be able to speculate in generalities.

"Of course; what did you think of the name?" she asked him with the smile she reserved for their inside jokes. Severus' response was to snort and wryly shake his head as he handed her the hat back.

"Figured you'd go for that one. Didn't doubt for a second you might."

"What's with the name?" Remus asked with genuine curiosity.

"If you were to believe Walt Disney, the greatest wizard of all time, Merlin himself, apparently had a comedic, grumpy sidekick pet owl whose name happened to be Archimedes, incidentally one of the greatest scientists of antiquity."

"Ah; _The Sword in the Stone_."

"So Lily's told you about that vicious monster she used to call a pet?" Severus asked flatly.

"Madam Mim was _not_ a monster. She just had a unique personality."

"Yes, she ate your woollen sweaters and liked Tuney of all people. I'd call that very unique."

"You're just bitter cause she didn't like you as much as she liked me," Lily said airily, and Severus spluttered, while Remus laughed.

"I'm not _bitter_! Why in seven hells would I be bitter? She scratched me up so badly your dad almost took me to have a tetanus shot. No, our hatred was _fully_ mutual."

"I remember; it was a source of endless amusement for Petunia." Lily sighed. "I did love that crazy cat. And hey, at least Archimedes doesn't seem to hate you."

"The heights he's reached, now that your owl has proclaimed him acceptable company," Remus joined in.

"Of course; anyone smart enough to run away from _you_ is someone whose approval I'll gladly deem worthy," Severus lobbed back.

"Oh, for Merlin's sake, you two," Lily said with a sudden spike of exasperation, rolling her eyes, though there was a strange sense of comfort in the fact that not _everything_ had been changed by the last three days. "You should have told me you wanted to share custody of my pet; I'm sure there's got to be _some_ little toad who'd like _both_ of you. Maybe we should call it Wart; that'd fit just right on all accounts, wouldn't it?"

Chastised (and tripping over each other's words in their haste to reassure her neither saw her as a 'little toad' so much that Lily actually cracked a genuine smile), both Remus and Severus let the little spat go, finally shutting up and following her when she tugged on her suitcase, having spotted the bus they were waiting for.

Lily did her best to leave everything that had happened this summer holiday at the bus door as she climbed in and wound her way onto the bench at the very back. After all, she was going on a seaside holiday, and the best part? The same damn weather that had made the summer insufferable so far was going to ensure that she was going to have three full weeks of sunshine on the beach, with no worry over being cooped up in a house, and with the promise of getting to tease two very self-conscious boys about their pale, skinny chests until they forgot all about obsessing over their feud, followed by some lovely girl time with her closest female friends.

If only she managed to actually not think about her home situation, it was going to be a _glorious_ three weeks.

* * *

 **A/N:** 'Wart' is another _Sword in the Stone_ reference - it's the nickname given to Arthur by his adoptive family, and basically the name he's called by throughout the film. The toad is, of course, a reference to the three allowed pet species at Hogwarts, since we already had Madam Mim the Cat, and Archimedes the Owl.

So, this brings the first half of Part II to a conclusion - meaning that the next thing up will be the Third Interlude, and as interludes serve the purpose of showing Severus or Lily or their relationship from an outside perspective that would otherwise not be a POV, you might already guess who's the resident guest POV this time. Next Sunday is my plan for posting it (since it's way shorter than my normal chapter length), but worst case, it'll be the following Wednesday (i.e. seven to ten days from now). Then it's the seaside vacation, and following that, some more Severus/Dumbledore interactions.

I am curious about everyone's opinions on Lily's home situation - which parent would you support in her current position, what do you think she should do, how do you see Petunia's reaction, can you imagine how this might have gone down in canon!Lily's life, etc? And, as I promised, I'll expound myself a bit more on this whole storyline in the interlude.


	26. Third Interlude: The Muggle Sister

**Third Interlude: The Muggle Sister**

 _You wonder if there is ever a time in everyone's life when they wish they were someone else._

 _You'd certainly not let yourself get to that point if it was the last thing you ever did; it is because you firmly believe that if one cannot handle their own life, then they are not deserving of anything but contempt or pity. You'd choose contempt any time. At least you see sincerity in contempt. Pity is like slime against your skin. That look of pity in people's eyes, as if they're saying 'I know my life is better than yours and I feel like gloating about it, but it's not the done thing, so I'll pity you instead, and you should be grateful for me calling it that'._

 _Lily is the queen of pity. No one does pity better than your sister. It's what you hate the most about her precious magic – that it's turned her into someone who feels entitled to pity people. You haven't the faintest how that Snape boy can stand it, but if there's one thing you do know, it's that he's the one who started her up on it, with his mismatched clothes and his ugly face and his disgusting hair; he's the one who taught her that, no mistake about it. And you would not even be surprised if the reason he did not care was because it is Lily doing it._

 _You are no fool, no matter what he thinks of you. You have seen and heard enough of that boy to know what sort of person he is, and how easily he can ruin Lily. From the very start, he has lifted his big nose up at you and your lack of their precious magic, and he has tried to poison her against you, against her life and the place she came from. If anyone asked you, you'd tell them it's due to his father; the whole town knows what Tobias Snape gets up to these days. And you've seen him with his wife on the street, more than once, seen the way that he looks at her, like she is his to own and possess, and yet as if he cannot stand it._

 _It's the way that Snape boy has looked at your sister since the very first day, and if she were not the ignorant fool that she is, she would have kept well away from him. But unfortunately, your dear baby sister loves rescuing strays, like that little monster cat she pulled out of the gutter, the one that ate all her jumpers. Like this Remus Lupin boy she brought home, some sort of Dark creature, scarred and tattered. But she certainly doesn't understand the way you do that strays cannot be tamed or brought to heel, they cannot be domesticated; they'll stay with you as long as you're good to them, but if it gets into their head to bite your hand while you pet them, they won't hesitate. You should know – that monster of a cat she brought home ended up liking you the most, because unlike Lily, who only ever wanted to smother it in love, you understood what it was, and treated it accordingly._

 _And Snape's so clearly proven all this to her, yet she hasn't gotten rid of him; take this Mudblood business – you have yet to figure out why she's forgiven him for it. In fact, to you, it seems almost as if she's doubled down on her determination, as if she's trying to prove to God and everyone that there's more to their friendship than a couple of childish years spent talking about magic and a sentimental attachment to ancient history. And in the end, all she's doing is making herself out to be an utter hypocrite in your eyes – she fancies herself to be some sort of champion for social equality (though you feel it makes her look both ignorant and immature) and yet she spends so much of her time on a boy who sees the world so crookedly. And she doesn't even understand how much she has changed in order to preserve that friendship, for no reason that you can think of other than because she likes the power she has over that boy._

 _And yet you've found yourself thinking recently: 'Perhaps not all of her changes are only due to him; not all of them are for the worse, after all'. You've caught on to the fact that she actually seems to be uncomfortable with all the praise your parents shower on her, for one thing. It's a first that you've seen, but it makes sense to you now that it's come out she's not, in fact, the perfect student they thought her to be. Another point is that the apology she gave you for using that detestable nickname appears not to be another empty promise, because she's not used that name ever since. 'Oh, it's early days yet,' you think, and really, Lily only ever truly takes Lily into consideration when deciding what's right and what's wrong, but you'll give her this – she's certainly trying harder at respecting you than she ever has before, and you can acknowledge that, you're only petty to those who give you cause to be so. Perhaps this time it really_ will _be different. You doubt it, because you've learned to have low expectations of her a long time ago, but perhaps._

 _What you find to be the worst part in all of this is that she genuinely doesn't seem to understand how she treats people. If you were honest, you'd admit that you can't quite grasp that; one's in control of one's own actions, is how you've always seen it, and one should know where one stands with people and the world. Perhaps it's because she's an idealist, and from what you can tell, idealists all seem to be a bunch of near-sighted fools in love with their double standards, dreaming up a world that could never exist and then railing against the world that_ does _exist, to the detriment of themselves and those close to them, and no benefit whatsoever that you can see._

 _That's where her championing of social equality and idealism meet, in your eyes – her belief that everyone is equal, which is to you yet another clear instance of her hypocrisy. After all, you'd argue, the primary reason why she's taken on almost all her friends is because she's seen something she wanted to fix in them, something that's lesser than in herself. Yet she would not let anyone say that she'd disliked them the way they were when she found them, because that might shatter her idealistic, unrealistic, double-standard worldview._

 _Yet you do see the possibility that she might yet outgrow all this – certainly, she's begun taking your words to heart, which is a good start, and if she continues to do so, then maybe she'll also hear you when you try to make her see the folly of her worldviews. You love your sister, whether or not she can see it; you haven't any other but her, and she's certainly not the only one who wishes things could be the way they'd been when you were children. You thought that impossible, and you still do, that's the way the world works. But since your last fight, you've come to the conclusion that there's still a relation between you worth investing in, worth trying for. Especially now, with how your family is falling apart._

 _Even at a distance, Lily is an unexpected support for you, and you believe you are for her, as well. You feel that it's good that she's gone off to meet with her girlfriends, because she spends far too much time with boys for your liking – though she's certainly not let anyone say any honest truth about how inappropriate all of this has been. Then again, what_ has _been appropriate in this in the first place? And you know that, unfortunately, her foolish idealism will only get her into trouble, thinking that your parents could be reconciled, even if that is what they_ should _do for the sake of all of your positions in society. But deep inside, you don't actually want that, much as it appals you to think how you'll be talked of in town. You don't want it because you feel that your mum deserves to be free to find someone else, someone who will value her the way she should be valued, instead of dreaming about idealistic, unattainable things and hurting her and your sister and yourself in the process._

 _You've found, over the years, that Lily really is her father's daughter, and so you fear it will one day cost her dearly, more dearly than it's already costing her. Because much as it's upset you, you can see that it's certainly upset her worse. She may think that you do not care for her but when it suits you, but you_ always _know when she's cried. And you suppose she does have some cause for it – no matter how much you detest that school of hers, you cannot dismiss the fact that she has certainly not had the exposure to the slow deterioration of that marriage that you've had. That she hasn't already made herself vocal about wishing the two of them back together, and with your father having given her the power to make that happen..._

 _Instead, she's run away. Your sister, who never runs from a challenge, who goes headlong into inadvisable situations, who believes herself to be the most qualified person in the world for everything, the only one always in the right. That same Lily ran away. If that does not signify a change in her, well, then you are not sure that anything could._

 _Whether that change comes from her relationship with those boys, Snape and Lupin, or from whatever it is that has been going on in the world of magic, that, you are not as clear on. Lily believes you ignorant and incapable of understanding, but when she discusses her world's politics with either of the boys, her voice carries, and you don't put much effort into not hearing what she is saying. Your supposition, given what you've grasped of it, is that her idealism makes sense – after all, it is the escape for those who do not wish to be confronted with the inevitability of realpolitik._

 _Then again, if anyone asked you, you'd certainly conclude that idealism is a far harder thing to stand by when it lies between two people, rather than two political ideologies. You cannot imagine that it has helped her in the least during her dealings with Snape. He is far too much of a pragmatist – in a way, vile as it is to you to think it, he is far more alike to you in this than her. It always leaves you wondering what it is that he sees in her, that makes him look at her the way he does, with such selfish hunger and jealousy. Is it all from the fact she condescended to be his friend in spite of who he is and where he comes from?_

 _If so, you'd certainly find him rather pathetic. Not that you've ever thought him anything else, given how like a feral puppy he was when you were children, how he'd follow her around and demand her attention, practically begging for every morsel of it, yet bite at anyone and everyone else to whom she'd bestow it that is not him. Oh, yes, you know full well he has coveted her since the beginning, you remember that glint in his black eyes the day he had approached you, greedy and jealous._

 _Perhaps that is where they resemble each other, you think, Lily and that boy – they do love their double standards. Snape certainly does have excess of pride for someone so shabby and unkempt, someone with such disreputable family and connections, with such unpleasant disposition, who never hesitates to be vicious and cruel when that pride is in the least threatened. Yet what would be beneath anyone with any self-respect and pride, he has no compunction of doing if it is for Lily. It is as if no low is too low, if it would win him her favour._

 _And Lily, the idealist, who defends what she holds dear stubbornly, without reason. It's funny to you in an ironic sort of way, that she does her utmost to justify and excuse that which she prefers, while condemning and judging that which does not suit her, even when the former is the worse than the latter. Especially when it is. How many times has she insisted that Snape's actions were not as you both witnessed them, that you were the one who was exaggerating you grievances with him? Like that time when he'd made your clothes shrink or that branch fall on your head, when you'd woken up with your hair suddenly short or your homework stained illegible with ink. Like a hundred other times when he got angry and you got hurt because of it._

 _Lily's excuse for his actions had always been that he had 'not meant it', that it was you who was more often than not being unfair, when it was so very clear to you that he had control over that wretched force and revelled in using it against you, who could not return the favour in equal measure. And why? Because she had preferred Snape's company to yours since 'magic' had entered her vocabulary, and she herself could do no wrong in choosing on whom she bestowed her attention and affection, so it could not be that that Snape boy was the rotten apple that you have always known him to be, underneath his grovelling ways, it has to be that you are the one not seeing clearly._

 _You would say that they deserve each other, except that you do not wish your sister to fall any further into these relations than she already has. She can do better on all accounts than Severus bloody Snape, if only she would be willing to pull her head out of the clouds, to lower her nose out of those lofty heights she has stuck it in. But a part of your hopes that perhaps everything that has happened with your parents will help her realise this. You feel that she has it in her still, that there's yet a chance for her to change into someone fairer and less self-important than she's been in the last years. Someone less idealistic._

 _Ugh, hope. Hope is an insidious thing, and you certainly dislike being a slave to it. But in this, you fear that it is out of your control. If anything good should come out of your father wrecking your family, is your opinion, then let it be your sister realising that she should not emulate your mother and devote herself to someone who is inherently far too selfish to appreciate her for all that she has given him, who will, in the end, turn against her as he has turned against everyone else around him, because there is no one more important to such a person than they themselves._

 _You wonder, if that were to happen, if Lily would turn out to be the type of person who finds herself wishing she was someone else._

 _You wonder, too, whether you'd feel pity her if she did, or contempt._

* * *

 **A/N:**

For those who might not have enjoyed the second person perspective of the interlude - the interludes serve to shed light on various side characters who won't be getting their own POV sections otherwise, and specifically their views on Severus, Lily and/or their relationship. But I am also using the interludes to experiment a bit with style and format, exploring ways of revealing character psyche through these writing tools. Such experimentation is staying confined to these small sections and won't intrude on my normal writing style.

So, the promised explanation regarding Lily's family plot: I am an adult child of divorced parents, so this topic is one that I could pull on from personal experience. My parents separated after 35 years of relationship (and 26 years of marriage) when I was 22 and my sister was 19, and the general comment of pretty much everyone who heard it echoed Severus' "I cannot believe it". By this time, both my sister and I had been away from home for university, (five and one year respectively). For us, the shock of it didn't come from the separation itself (in fact, my sister and I discussed our fear of it going in that direction only months only before it happened), but rather from the suddenness of the final decision, because we hadn't seen any sort of gradual escalation of issues for a number of reasons, one of which is no doubt the fact that we simply weren't there in the first place (just like Lily). And of course, this ties into Lily (and the other Muggle-borns in general) gradually losing true contact with their home life, something that I found to be quite significant in HP canon, yet utterly unaddressed (Hermione's parents are notably neither named nor ever really seen in canon, the only set of parents of JKR's core seven - similar to how Lily's parents are not named, something she shares with only Peter of the main Marauder Era characters).

I drew on my parents' situation some in building the Evans', but certainly, I didn't copy-paste it. The disparity in how each parent sees the situation in terms of length and severity of issues that built up to the marriage dissolution, the involvement of third parties in some capacity (and I mean this in more than the straightforward cheating scenario of Lily's father, such as wider family giving their opinions, friends who had gone through similar experiences sharing their views, children voicing our perceptions, their immediate environment and microsociety, etc), the fundamental alienation of two people evolving in directions that lead away from each other due to circumstances, lack of foresight and awareness, or upbringing that taught them to place value differently on different parts of their lives - all of those are things that I got to see firsthand and which I feel are perhaps even ubiquitous in something as difficult as divorce.

But most of all, I drew on my own feelings regarding everything, and in some ways even more from those of my sister, because she is the emotional type of the two of us (I'm a hard logician), and we processed things quite differently: I, like Petunia, was the one who needed to be involved with the process, to be part of the discussions regarding asset division and such, whereas my sister basically fled to her boyfriend's for the summer, not wishing to be included in anything for fear of being forced to choose sides. What Lily and I share, though (and neither Petunia nor my sister truly do), is the need to understand the emotions and motivations of both sides in order to come to some sort of personal conclusions, and that disappointment and alienation Lily feels with her mother is something that I also experienced with one of my parents, because in my case as well, one parent was capable of expressing their inner selves whereas the other wasn't in the least, and even lashed out verbally when I pressed too hard.

Naturally, there is one more thing that differs, and that is the ages of the children involved; it is far easier, I think, to come to terms with parental divorce when the child has begun their own life away from home, than it is for teens who are still strongly part of the family unit. In that sense, Lily's position is somewhat nebulous, given that she's away for most of the year yet she's still clearly a teen, while Petunia's is the straightforward one, her having not gone away for schooling. Unlike them, my sister and I were to an extent already accepting of the fact that our parents are far from perfect individuals, but I do have to say that, looking back on the experience, I definitely feel that I've gotten the final measure of both of my parents through it, and that while I've tried very hard to not let anything that happened between the two of them have an impact on my relationship with either, I have also found that knowing it helped me understand how they behave towards me individually and why. One thing I feel grew into an assurance for me - explanations aren't justification. We are all ultimately responsible for our own actions (barring mental illness such as schizophrenia, of course), and understanding why someone behaves they way they do does not excuse their actions. But it is also hard to judge situations or individuals as an outsider, because you can never know what is between two people, so making decisions on this before knowing the whole story is always perilous to greater or lesser extent.

One thing I ask of everyone reading - don't cement your conclusions regarding this issue just yet. One big thing that Lily isn't yet familiar with is what exactly happened in the two years between the affair and now. All she knows is that 1) her parents unsuccessfully tried counselling, and 2) that her mother thought things had gone back to being good. Two (and a half, technically) years is a very long time when there are unresolved problems hanging over the relationship, after all. This will be revisited a little later on, when Lily comes to her final decision regarding her father's suggestion of her (and Petunia) dictating their family's future, after she's had time to discuss it with her friends and let it settle properly in her psyche.

* * *

For everyone who has consistently or just occasionally commented on my story, a big THANK YOU! I truly appreciate all the support and thoughts you shared with me over my story, even if I don't always find the time to respond individually. An additional enormous hug and kiss for my pseudo-beta, Moon999, who manages to find time in her super busy schedule to read through all this and share her personal and professional insights into character motivations and actions, policing me for possible OOCness and of course everything else that goes into building a complex story like this one.

 **slugfighter** \- While I very much see what you meant with your comment (and actually don't disagree too much regarding Lily's mother, given that she grew up in the 40s and 50s, when there was a huge pushback for women to 'go back to the kitchen'), my question here is: why does the burden of blame have to fall on the husband? There is actually a mirror thing going on with Petunia - she outright tells Lily in a letter that she intends to be like their mother, work as a secretary until she marries and becomes a housewife, and she looks forward to it. On the other hand, I, as an intellectual, find that my relationships fade if I lose topics of conversation with my friends, so I certainly wouldn't want my spouse to change to the point where we have no more shared interests. So isn't it also possible that Lily's father would have wanted her mother to be something more than a housewife, but she was the one who chose to give up her other interests for whichever reason (e.g. her parents pushing her to do so)? Personalities should perhaps come into consideration here - as some reviewers have noted, Lily's mother is a forceful personality who dominates in the family unit (and both Lily and Petunia have picked this up from her), while Lily's father is passive to the point of detriment (the core issue of his personality). Should he then be blamed for her conforming to societal expectations that robbed her of her interests? And more importantly, does this situation mean that he is not entitled to be happy - is it the case of 'tit-for-tat', of 'women are often encouraged to only be fulfilled through family and not through their interests, so it's only fair that men lose fulfillment in one of these areas too'?  
I am not in the least excusing Lily's father's affair, I am more trying to focus on the idea that we should not take any more or less than is our share of blame, and that we are all also responsible for our own happiness, too - including, in fact, not letting life and society and outside pressure dictate 100% where we find fulfillment. And as I've stated above, we don't know *how* Lily's father had approached her mother about fixing the relationship, that was not stated by anyone yet; perhaps he had, in fact, been empathetic towards her, but just like she couldn't speak it to Lily, she also couldn't speak it to him and shut him out (just giving this as one possible example)? However the burden of blame for a failed relationship is distributed, I believe that it ALWAYS falls on both parties in some measure, so as much as he was to blame with his infidelity, so too is she to an extent, at the very least for not being willing to acknowledge that there were problems in the first place.


	27. Ch II,23: To Seek an Equilibrium

**A/N:** So, I'm keeping the rating at T for now, because I refuse to raise it for anything other than Snily. But, a warning before the chapter - I do feel James' scene here goes towards the more mature spectrum of a T rating (though not beyond it). Namely, his section has discussion on his sexual history and experiences, which is very relevant to his character. There are no detailed descriptions or scenes of him actually having sex, because he will NOT be getting (the first) actual smut in this story, this is a Snily so they deserve to be the first with such a scene (if not the only ones). I wish I could go so far as to say he will never get any sort of smutty reference to anything at all, but that's not the case - however, what's presented in this chapter is the furthest I'm planning to ever push the Marauders' scenes in this direction, so hopefully you can bear it with me.

* * *

 **Chapter 23: To Seek an Equilibrium**

Clotilde Babineaux's cottage was located in northern Yorkshire, about half-way between Whitby and Scarborough. Remus, Lily and Snape were forced to walk from the nearby fishing town, which was the farthest point that they could reach by public transportation. The day was so clear that they could see how the North York Moore woodland smouldered in the distance, the timber so dry that it had caught fire – Remus remembered seeing it on the news a little while back, and the wildfire was still going. They had no worry about it, though; the cottage was designated as a wizarding residence, with protective wards wrapping around the property, down to the beach and well into the sea, offering a quiet, private – and most importantly, protected – little paradise for its inhabitants.

There were swarms of lady birds covering the grassy inclines, tree roots and branches, and man-made structures, reminding of nothing so much as a carpet. Remus had never in his life seen anything like it, and he found himself remembering the locust swarm from the Bible; at least they were dealing with nice bugs here. The air smelled salty, too, and so strongly that it made the slumbering wolf stir in contentment, serving to strengthen the longing Remus was already feeling to lie on his back and float on the calm water surface, and forget about everything but the whisper and gurgle of the vast blue.

The cottage itself was a quaint little thing on the outside, though the inside was magically expanded enough that there were four small bedrooms upstairs and two bigger ones downstairs, with a kitchen opening to a lovely garden overlooking the beach, a living space with a boarded up fireplace on the other end of the cottage, a sun room to the side, and a bathroom for each of the two floors. They settled their things in three of the upstairs bedrooms and congregated in the kitchen, where Remus took over making a light supper for the three of them, while Lily and Snape began unpacking and enlarging what turned out to be a whole host of magical ingredients, along with other paraphernalia for brewing.

"What's the deal with all of that?" he asked as he fired up the stove to fry chicken.

"My mother insisted that I do the work I owe her in exchange for letting me come here," Snape replied with an annoyed huff.

"The work you owe her?"

"Must be _lovely_ not having to earn your keep. Though I suppose not eating your parents every month must be enough recompense to them."

Remus bit his tongue and let the needling comment pass; he and Snape had been going back and forth on it, trying to keep themselves from escalating the hostilities (because the few times they didn't, it upset Lily enough that she got ornery with them for the next fifteen or twenty minutes), though neither seemed to be quite able to curb their instinct to resort to verbal jabs. It was a bigger challenge than it had been over the weekend, no doubt because the atmosphere had been too morose for _any_ sort of comments whatsoever until now. Still, they both more-or-less kept to their silent agreement on not outright fighting, and with Lily as the buffer, things never became as tense as Remus had imagined they'd be when Lily had first suggested he visit with her for an extended period of time. The coming week was going to be testing both their resolve and their patience, no doubt, but it seemed a less daunting – and less deeply unpleasant – prospect than it might have been last week, before they'd agreed to a ceasefire.

Instead, Remus took note of what Snape had indirectly implied about his home life. That his mother expected him to 'earn his keep' was enough to make Remus pity the other boy, because no matter how bad Remus' relationship with his father got periodically, at least he never suspected that he was a nuisance to his parents in the way that Snape apparently was – a burden, yes, given his lycanthropy, but a burden that his parents had always gone to great lengths to demonstrate wasn't an unwilling one.

"Will you make me more of that sun-protection lotion?" Lily asked Snape, looking more animated and elated by getting to freely use magic than Remus had seen her in days. "Oh, and we'll for sure need the sunburn salve you made me last month; I swear, those things saved me from being red as a crab."

"I'm sure we could all use it," Remus agreed, peeling the leaves of the salad head into a bowl to wash. "We should probably divide chores, too, so that we don't trip over each other."

"Sure; I can do meals if you do the cleaning and taking care of the beach stuff, and then Sev can handle the brewing and the dishes. We can grocery-shop when we go sight-seeing in the evenings; I got us some pamphlets about both Whitby and Scarborough at the bus station."

"Snape, I'll trade you the dishes for toilet cleaning."

Snape snorted. "In your dreams, wolf."

"Severus," Lily chided.

"Lupin," Snape corrected himself grudgingly. "Lily, it's not fair that you're counting the cooking and the cleaning as equal; we're free to use magic here."

"Yes, but I know plenty about cooking, since Mum's been adamant about us girls being properly instructed in homemaking – don't even get me started –"

" _Please, don_ _'_ _t,_ " both Snape and Remus said at the same time, making Lily snigger while the two of them exchanged exasperated, though commiserating glances; Lily's rants tended to be quite fiery, and they both apparently knew her well enough to not let her gather steam for one just now.

"As I was saying, whereas I can cook for us with no trouble, I know practically no housekeeping charms whatsoever."

"Then let Lupin take over _all_ the cleaning; I'll have my hands full as is with everything Mother expects me to send her plus what we'd need here."

"If you can make some moonshine for us, you have yourself a deal," Remus bargained (rather charitably, in his opinion).

"Done," Snape jumped on it, offering a predatory, self-satisfied grin.

"Home-made distillery? Really?"

"Lily, _no one_ can make good liquor like a good potioneer can," Remus said as he flipped the quietly sizzling chicken breast over in the pan. "Even rotgut liquor you can make in a week."

"Is that a compliment, w–" Snape grunted, and Remus turned his head just in time to see Lily lift her foot off his, "Lupin?"

"Just a statement of fact, the way I see it; or aren't you at the head of our class in Potions?"

"Not that you and yours ever acknowledge it."

Remus winced into the frying pan and moved to cut the tomatoes; Snape did have a point that James and Sirius had a tendency to insult him for his intellect – which, come to think of it, was a very double standard thing of them, given how little they'd minded Remus being a bookworm too. But what else was new?

* * *

They ended up eating the chicken salad out in the back of the cottage, sprawling on three beach chairs and with the late afternoon sun beating on the back of their heads. Lily was the only one to change into looser clothing (a white cheesecloth shirt and peach-coloured shorts), with her wide-brimmed hat protecting her crown and sunglasses hiding the dark circles under her tired eyes. Severus and Lupin had both chosen to stay in their slacks and button-downs, though Severus' sleeves were long and rolled up where Lupin's were short from the start.

The conversation was light and centred on making tentative plans for the week, given the proximity of interesting tourist sites – the ruins of Whitby Abbey interested Lily primarily because of their connections to Bram Stocker's _Dracula_ , but there were also the museum dedicated to Captain James Cook in Whitby, as well as the castle, the Rotunda Museum and the Open Air Theatre in Scarborough. Lupin seemed more interested in lazing on the beach, while Severus himself preferred visiting historical sites, and Lily was split, though privately Severus did wonder how much energy she was going to have – she already looked as if her head was too heavy for her shoulders.

After supper, Lupin wandered back into the cottage to wash their few eating utensils and change for swimming, and Severus breathed a silent sigh of relief at having finally some time with Lily to himself. Spending the whole day in the werewolf's company had been exhausting, because he couldn't get his own nerves to settle – every time Lupin made a sudden move, he had to clamp down on his own urge to jump, and every time something made the other boy grunt or growl in conversation, he got flashbacks to that horrid night and the sight of a fully shifted werewolf almost salivating at the end of the tunnel beneath the Whomping Willow. He knew Lily wanted him to be more friendly, and Severus _was_ trying, for her sake as well as the sake of a week's worth of peace by the seaside (his first time _at_ the seaside, in fact), but it was hard enough he slipped back into his default mental mode of dealing with one of the Marauders – namely, taunting and insults, coupled with a very trigger-easy alertness. After a full day in close quarters with Lupin (they'd taken the bus, rather than a public Floo, because Lily had insisted this was part of the enjoyment of seaside holiday – actually getting there – and given her home situation, both boys had thought to indulge her), Severus was starting to grudgingly appreciate the other boy's restraint, because it, Severus' determination to do whatever it took to prove to Lily that he was committed to improving their relationship, and Lily herself playing a buffer were together able to keep the situation safely away from boiling.

But he was relieved that Lupin was apparently giving them some privacy (and about fucking time, given that he'd spent more time with Lily in the last week than Severus had in the last month, when all was tallied up).

"I'm so glad you came with," Lily said quietly, taking off her hat to tug the elastics out of her hair and run her fingers through it before resetting it. Her red hair tumbled down her shoulders and back, and it would have looked magnificent if not for the fact that her roots were slick and oily from the heat and the travel, about as oily as Severus' own hair usually was.

Severus found himself wishing that he could bury his fingers into the red waterfall of strands, nonetheless.

Merlin, it was _still_ unbearably hot. Saying quietly: "I'm glad, too," he stretched, hating how his shirt clung to his body because it was soaked through with sweat. Conceding another inch of his pride to the heat – because it felt like the summer would _never_ end by now – Severus pulled out the shirt from his trousers and then pulled up the rolled-up trouser legs to unstick them from his thighs.

"You know, you could just take that damned shirt off," Lily commented with a small smile. "We _are_ on the seaside, you'll have to take it off tomorrow for swimming."

"I am not taking off my shirt, Lily," he replied, shaking his head. "And I don't have to take it off tomorrow, either; I can just swim in it."

"You're being completely ridiculous about it," she told him with a roll of her eyes, and they fell silent as Lupin emerged from the cottage, sporting swimming trunks and a tee-shirt, and carrying a beach towel. "Well, you came prepared."

"You did say we'd go swimming when you invited me. Granted, it was going to be the swimming pool, rather than the sea, but it worked out well enough, I'd say."

"That it did," she confirmed with a nod and a smile. "We'll see you later, then? I'll be turning in early, I'm dead on my feet already."

"And we'll play nice," Lupin assured her, "right, Snape?"

"Haven't we been doing that for days now?" Severus muttered, staring heavenward for a moment in exasperation.

Once Lupin had walked down the path towards the beach, Lily turned back to Severus, extending her hand with a hair elastic pinched between her fingers.

"At least tie your hair back, then," she suggested, almost taunting him with the thing in her fingers. "I feel overheated just _looking_ at you, I swear."

"You really expect me to do it?" he asked, giving her an incredulous look, which she answered with a small, mischievous smile of her own, wiggling her fingers until the elastic bounced lightly between the tops of her thumb and forefinger.

"I know you will; this heat is grinding down even your pride, Severus."

Sighing, because damn it all to seven hells, she was right, he reached for the offered elastic – black, thank Merlin – and pulled his hair back into a bun, even as Lily did the same so that she could put her hat back on. She gave him a look that he couldn't read because of those sunglasses of hers, and nodded.

"You know, if you tied your hair back more often, it wouldn't be as noticeable when it gets oily. Oh, and I've got this amazing shampoo that worked _wonders_ for me after all the O.W.L. preparation – I thought my hair would _never_ be clean again after that, I swear, but this thing worked like a charm. If you want, I could give it to you to try; I got it out of a witch beauty mag–"

"Must we talk about this?" he interrupted her, itching to change the subject.

She shrugged. "Suit yourself. Did you think to bring swimming trunks at all? Do you even _have_ any?"

"Yes."

"That don't predate Merlin?"

"There is nothing wrong with wizarding swimwear. Or _my_ wizarding swimwear, for that matter."

"There is more wrong than we'd have time to say in our _lives_ , Sev." Shaking her head, she grabbed hold of his hand and tugged him to his feet. "Come on."

"Where are we going?" he asked her, lifting his eyebrow sceptically, even though he did let her tug him inside and up the stairs. Holding her hand – warm and a bit sweaty, but with soft skin and nails just long enough to give a shadow of a pinch when her fingers squeezed – was worth a lot more than tolerating being led around in total ignorance.

"To remedy the situation," she answered, leaving him half-way guessing what she meant by it and dreading it already. She released his hand once they reached her room, moving swiftly to dig through her suitcase until she found a small plastic bag that she handed to him. "I got you this when I was shopping with Petunia that one time," she explained with a shrug.

And of course, when he pulled the clothing pieces out, they turned out to be black swimming trunks and a dark, slytherin-green tee-shirt out of very light cotton. Frowning, Severus found himself torn between insulted indignation, smarting pride, dread-filled confusion and helpless pleasure, leaving him momentarily completely frozen and unable to react.

"You got me swimming trunks... as a present?" he settled on incredulity.

"And a matching shirt, though I'm still hoping I can convince you to forgo it. I think I got the size right, but I'm sure you know spells to fix that if you need to."

"I am not sure..."

"Severus, you'll look fine," Lily said earnestly, moving her hand to place it on his. "It's not much more revealing than the concessions you've already made for the heat, and this won't stand out the way the wizarding swimwear does if you ever end up not being on a wizarding beach. "

"How much did you–"

"Don't," she cut him off, a bit sharply. "That's a present, end of story." She softened her words by offering him a small smile. "You deserve to get things with no strings attached, Severus, and besides, haven't we agreed that it's an important part of close friendships?"

Feeling a bit dim-witted, Severus nodded; they'd gotten each other things before, of course, but only for birthdays and Christmases, the two socially-acceptable occasions for such things. Perhaps the reason this was affecting him so unexpectedly was that it felt, suddenly all at once, like this was new territory for them, a new direction they'd never gone in before – it was the first gift he'd ever received from her just because, and yet it was a gift that felt so loaded with subtext, because she knew that he disliked Muggle things, and she knew that he had an issue with feeling underdressed, and she knew he disliked being manipulated and pushed into things, and yet it felt like she had not done it with one ounce of maliciousness.

"Is it?" he found himself asking her. "Without strings attached?"

Lily's face pinched in a displeased expression, but after a moment she sighed and relaxed into weary sadness that made Severus' insides twist unpleasantly.

"You don't have to wear it if you don't like it, Severus. I wish you'd try and value yourself more, and I think that working on your appearance is a good place to start; it's one of the things girls seem to understand better than boys, you know – that appearance is tied to self-esteem. I know you like that people don't notice you, and I don't... I don't mind that at all, but I... it feels like you've started hiding from me, too, in the last couple of years, and that _does_ bother me." The edge of her mouth twitched upwards into a rueful smile. "Confidence suits you; the only agenda I might have had with buying you those swimming trunks is to let you know that if you're resistant to, er, showing skin, because you think I'd dislike how you look, then you needn't be afraid, because I don't care if you're skinny and have pale skin and no chest hair and, um–" she cut herself off, blushing lightly, and Severus felt himself slip into similar awkwardness for a moment, but Lily was already powering on, not giving the moment any weight, "anyway, I only meant it as a free offer, not as an obligation. You really don't have to wear them if you don't want to. But just, there's no one really to see except me and Remus, and from what I've heard tell, Remus' scars extend beyond his face, so I'm sure he'd not think anything of it. As I said, it's a present, with no strings attached, so what you do with it is your discretion completely, all right?"

"All right," Severus agreed slowly, more out of a need to get away from this conversation than because he had nothing to say to her on the topic – not least of which was that she seemed to have completely misinterpreted the reason _why_ he felt uncomfortable being metaphorically naked in her presence. "Thank you for the present. Will _you_ be all right?" he asked quietly instead, and Lily blinked, then rubbed her eyes wearily with her fingers.

"I just really want to get some proper sleep," she answered in a shaky voice, and though Severus recognised her answer for what it was – hedging – he let her have it.

"If you need me, you come get me," he instructed her.

She gave him a slightly watery smile and hugged him, and Severus relatively readily responded, wrapping her in his arms and providing her with the comfort she sought. She clung to him for a long time and he cherished each second of it, and when she finally pulled away, he left her in her room with the door closed, settling in his own across from hers and finding himself feeling more than a little twisted up about the present and the lingering sensation of her hair against his chin and her slender arms like a vice around his midriff.

It was a bit of a struggle to not obsess over the whole thing, to not spend hours into the evening mulling over her words, trying to tease out all possible meanings out of them, but Severus did do it, mostly because he was too tired from the day-long journey, and there was a bigger chance of getting it wrong than right in his current state of mind. Instead, he dug his Dark Arts books out of his bag and forced his mind to spell invention and improvement, a method that worked well enough in the past and served just as effectively now, at least until the sound of muffled sobbing pulled him out of his thoughts.

Taking a deep breath, he climbed off his bed and padded softly out of his own room to rest his hand and forehead against Lily's closed door, his heart hurting for her and his mind screaming at him to comfort her. Instead, he only made enough noise for her to know that he was right outside her room and then seated himself as comfortably as he could on the floor, rested his side against the door, and settled in with his book for the vigil.

He had a feeling it was going to be a long night.

* * *

"There now," the healer said as he resettled the covers over Enid Pettigrew's hip on the bed. "You must be careful how you move about for the next two weeks, and at the first hint of counter indications, your nephew must contact me immediately, do you understand?"

"Of course I do," Enid replied with the type of huff tolerated from little old ladies and frail, injured patients. "I was born without magic, not without common sense."

The healer, a rather ordinary-looking man in his forties, if Peter was to guess, nodded a bit distantly.

"Very good. Now, then, as to the matter of payment..."

Peter dealt with that particular matter himself, handing the man a small money bag with the fee in question and arranging briefly his follow-up visit. Once the man had Disapparated, Peter slumped onto his aunt's bed by her knees and rubbed his face wearily with his hand.

"It should be a relief to your mother, at least," Enid noted quietly, though there was still belligerence under it. Peter couldn't blame her, not with the way that the healer had disapproved of pretty much everything from the moment he'd arrived, from having to deal with a Squib to the fact that Enid had spent a couple of weeks at a Muggle hospital, to the way that Muggles treated these sorts of injuries in general. Frankly, by the time he'd finally finished healing Enid and proscribing the potions for her to take in the next few days, Peter himself felt like snapping at the man.

And that was even before the matter of payment.

"How is she doing with work?"

Peter glanced at the bedroom door, listening for the sounds of his mother in Enid's kitchen, making them all something simple for lunch.

"She's managing," Peter answered, shrugging his shoulders. It was about the long and short of it, really. "They weren't very well pleased with her taking three days to let them know she's ill, so she's on thin ice."

"I imagine she didn't tell you that directly," Enid noted shrewdly, and Peter glanced at her before shaking his head.

"Of course not, Aunt. But it's obvious enough from the way she acts about the job." In truth, Peter had walked her to her office in Diagon Alley and then snuck away into an alley where he wouldn't be observed and turned into Wormtail in order to watch over her without being noticed. He held a strong dislike for Lauris' immediate supervisor, who seemed the sleazy type, and had definitely made Peter's mother uncomfortable her first day back, but beyond that, there wasn't much Peter could do about it, so he'd swallowed it with difficulty and kept silent.

"Will you have enough money for the rest of the month?"

Peter shrugged and looked in his aunt's direction, though not meeting her eyes directly without being too obvious about it. He was a good liar, but he'd never really been able to deceive his aunt, and evasion was the next best thing.

"Will _you_?"

Because they were both more-or-less broke now. The treatment that was going to ensure that Enid was back on her feet within a week cost them dearly, and though in all honesty, Peter had had serious moments of doubt about doing it, in the end his love for his aunt and wish for her wellbeing, as well as his mother's peace of mind, had far outweighed the headache of sustaining his mother's drug habit without being able to put two pounds together.

"You know I get paid per class, and can request it on a by-one basis," Enid assured him, sharp eyes scanning Peter's face. "You are far more my worry, Petey. With Lauris as she is..."

"She's doing better," Peter assured her. "And now that you're going to be back on your feet, she'll have more motivation to work with me. I'll manage, really."

"Oh, Peter, sweetie, you really don't need to do all of it alone."

"Auntie, please," Peter said, taking her hand, "what's most important is that you recover fully and get your normal life back. You look after Ma for nine months out of the year anyway; the least I can do is pull my own weight when I'm here, yeah? I can do it."

Enid cupped his cheek with her free hand, gently caressing beneath his eye with her thumb. Grimacing, she tugged him gently forward into a hot, sticky hug that felt like _exactly_ what Peter needed right in that moment. Within moments, he felt almost boneless in her familiar embrace.

"You are the best son a mother could ask for, and the best nephew I could ever have had, Peter," she said into his hair, and it felt like she was reaching straight into his chest with her long, bony pianist's fingers and squeezing his heart. Peter shut his eyes tightly to keep the tears in and thought to himself that he would do _anything_ to keep his aunt safe and happy and there to hold him when he needed her to. "You don't ever have to prove anything to me, love, not ever."

Peter bit his lip and hated the ghost that hovered over them, over his own actions and his aunt's words, the ghost of the man who'd left his wife and his four-year-old son because they hadn't been good enough for him. The thought that his aunt hated her brother just as much was a strange sort of comfort to the pudgy, short sixteen-year-old boy in that moment.

"Now, then," Enid said after another minute or two, pushing him back up to look him in the eyes, "the moment I start working again, you're taking some of my pay, I won't hear anything else of it, understood? And I've someone who won't stiff us for the price of those potions, an old friend of mine from childhood. We'll write to her, and I'm sure she'll be willing to meet you in Diagon Alley to give them to you."

"What friend is this, then?" Peter asked, cocking his head. He decided to let the money issue pass for now; by the time Enid got paid, he will have already figured out a way of getting what his mother needed – he already had an idea on how to pull it off, he just needed to do some research at a magical library somewhere in order to figure out how much wiggle room he'd have on accomplishing it. As a rule, his aunt didn't speak of her remaining connections to the wizarding world, though what Peter knew of them, they were mostly of ill repute – Jared, their dealer, being an example.

Enid's smile was quite wry. "Ah, Petey, what friends do I have from that world but fellow outcasts, hm? Her name's Eileen Prince, she's a brewer by trade. We would have been in school together if I'd had magic."

Peter lifted his eyebrows expectantly, and Enid's smile widened at the way he wheedled without actually saying anything.

"She ran away and got married to a Muggle, so her parents disowned her. Not very pleasant people, from what I remember. She got back in touch with me when she needed help adjusting to the Muggle world, and I've put her in contact with customers over the years. She won't object to deferring payment for a few weeks, she dislikes owing people and this is harmless enough recompense."

"Ah," Peter said knowingly, "a Slytherin, then?"

"Probably one of the most Slytherin of people I've ever met, yes," Enid confirmed. "She isn't an easy person to know, but she's fair, and I've quite liked her since we were running around the big house while our fathers discussed their business. We used to hide in the wall passages of her home and eavesdrop on our mothers trading veiled insults over tea."

"Well, if you trust her..." Getting to his feet, Peter squeezed his aunt's hand. "You hungry, Aunt?"

"Hm, yes, I'm definitely feeling peckish. Are you going to see if Laurie needs your help in the kitchen?"

"I thought I might."

Enid pressed a kiss to the back of his hand and then let it go. "Good; it's been too long since we've all had lunch together anyway."

Peter's smile lasted until he was out of her bedroom, where she couldn't see him anymore. Then he took in a deep breath, expelled it, and turned his mind to the constant issue of his mother and her needs, like he'd been doing all summer long.

* * *

Nights were the hardest, but then Lily had expected that. The first night, she had truly thought that she'd be too tired to do anything but collapse into unconsciousness, but then she'd impulsively chosen to give Severus those swimming trunks she'd gotten him, and somehow with just one suspicion-filled question, he'd made her second-guess and doubt herself for a few endless seconds, gone and made her open herself emotionally to him and their bumpy relationship baggage, and once she'd done that, everything else had welled up like a tide until she'd simply dropped on her bed and cried out of sheer exhaustion of the last three days. She'd woken up in the morning feeling sluggish and groggy, but the sounds of clanking beneath her feet and water running in the bathroom next door made her smile, simply because it was a new day, it was pleasantly cool even though the sun was already high enough in the sky to be slowly cooking the landscape, and she was on vacation.

The second night was easier; she kept waking up throughout it, heart racing from dreams she couldn't remember, stomach cramping when her mind seemed to constantly zero in on the fact that her family was now broken into pieces, but she got through it with just a few tears. The third night, she couldn't fall asleep and ended up crying out of sheer frustration with the constant exhaustion, and though her eyes still stung in the morning, she felt miles better for having had a familiar reason for getting upset in the night – she'd never been good at handling insomnia. The fourth night, she slept through, and on day five, she finally began feeling like herself again.

She couldn't find it in herself to tell Severus that she knew he spent hours into the night sitting by her bedroom door, doing his reading and writing no doubt, a silent presence that made her achingly grateful, because he made her feel safe, made things feel somehow shockingly familiar even though it was almost baffling to witness, and that was what she needed the most (she thanked him instead by leaving a seat cushion from the patio along with the extra pillow in her room by the door when she retired, and thought that he likely understood). Lily knew that Severus cared for her, of course – but it felt like, ever since she'd let out into the air that she perhaps sort-of knew about his feelings for her, he was going out of his way to prove it, in unobtrusive, stealthy ways that made her, more than ever, aware of just how far their relationship had deteriorated until that whole mess during the O.W.L.s, how much she'd missed, purposefully or not. It was obvious, of course, that this was new behaviour, no doubt prompted by Remus' arrival and her family mess, but it didn't change the fact that it made her think – and given the only other option of issues to occupy her mind, for once Lily found herself not minding it in the least.

Of course, the days were much more relaxing than the nights. While she always felt bloated upon waking whenever she ended up crying in the night, Lily fought hard not to let that stop her from thoroughly enjoying herself throughout the day. In what turned into a bit of a routine over the course of the week, the three teenagers met up in the kitchen around nine, Severus usually fully occupied with his brewing or fermenting of the corn they'd bought the first day for the moonshine, Lily preparing breakfast, and Remus mostly half-dozing over a book even if he always migrated downstairs first. It took some negotiation that first day, naturally, regarding who liked eating what, who took up which space in the room, and who needed how much time to accomplish each task, but they were usually ready to leave the cottage by ten-thirty.

Touristy things found them generally getting along; there was something external to be focused on, and most of the conversation revolved around it. Lily spent a couple of days rereading _Dracula_ while sunning on the beach in preparation for the visit to Whitby, and managed to rope the still-uneasy boys into a rather lively discussion on the topic of fictional representation of real beings such as vampires and werewolves during one late lunch, that surprisingly enough went a long way towards relaxing everyone – she felt almost triumphant about it, actually, because she knew that at their core, all three of them were bookish types to one extent or another, and that once they managed to find a conversation topic that was engaging enough for all of them, Severus and Remus wouldn't be as wary of each other as they'd been so far.

She was also starting to recognise when their sniping at each other went beyond the bounds of necessity and towards the danger zone of a conflict. The fact was that they still quite intensely disliked one another. Severus was afraid of Remus on an almost instinctual level, something she'd not anticipated, though she really, really should have. No doubt this was due to the fact that Remus' condition felt distant to her, separate from who Remus was in everyday situations – it was something that happened to him once a month, and didn't impact him in any but the most physical of ways for the rest of the time. And what Severus had gone through in February, it was something they'd never properly talked about, not beyond the confines of those initial, anger-charged moments when he'd told her the truth about Remus nearly mauling him. She'd never considered that the Remus she saw _was_ , in fact, also the Remus that Severus saw, and she was once again turning into a horrid friend through her own blindness. And as for Remus, the fact also was that Severus could be verbally vicious when he wanted to be, and Remus had a strange combination of low self-esteem and strong, underhanded defensive sense that Lily suspected had been more than a little nurtured by Potter and Black over the past five years. Beyond that, she could glimpse that there was some sort of root cause of their animosity that went beyond this, though for the life of her she couldn't figure out what that was in order to address it.

So, most of the time on the beach was spent trying to figure out how far she could let their sniping go before it exploded in everyone's faces (it helped that they both seemed to feel guilty whenever she got involved with the fight, and that this was clearly enough to push them into the sullen silence phase of the conflict), while working out the ways in which to try and allay Severus' fear of Remus and Remus' dislike of Severus. She found that she didn't mind it all that much; both boys had a somewhat macabre sense of humour that, when allowed to shine through, helped harmonise the conversation, and their willingness to take a step back whenever they began falling into a more antagonistic pattern helped her remember that finding a workable dynamic between them was a goal they all shared – one she was growing more and more convinced they could actually pull off with every averted fight and every pleasantly spent day.

So all in all, Lily's countenance had an upward trajectory that week, and her heart felt full to bursting with gratefulness towards these two boys, who were honestly the best friends she thought she could have ever gotten. And by gradually working out ways of keeping the peace between them, she also felt her self-confidence renewing itself. She'd missed so much in the past few years, in her relationship with Severus, in her family's dynamics, in Petunia's antagonism, and most of all in her own behaviour, but succeeding here made her hopeful that she could also improve in other areas, if only she devoted time and effort to it.

And more than ever, Lily felt ready to do exactly that, in all those places that counted the most.

* * *

James' sexual interest had sprung up on the earlier side of general norms, growing out of his natural vanity and pleasure in being noticed and being the centre of attention. His first real kiss had been with Neela Fellington, a Gryffindor girl a year older than him, at the beginning of his third year. He'd lost his virginity to Veruca Nithercott, a Ravenclaw in his year, for his fourteenth birthday, and she'd been just as inexperienced as he had. They'd been dating for almost a month by then, and had stayed together another month, before James had gotten annoyed with her almost obsessive interest in the Mermish language. He'd evolved something of a love-'em-and-leave-'em reputation, mostly because while girls were fun – seducing them was fun, wining and dining them was fun, and most of all, shagging was fun – none of them could hold his interest the way Lily Evans had since the first time he'd seen her, back on the Hogwarts Express at the age of eleven, and sooner or later, each and every girl found herself lacking in comparison, necessitating James moving on from them.

That was, of course, also because once he'd managed to win them over, there was little challenge left to it. Lily had been the only girl he'd ever been interested in who'd managed to resist him this easily, and so all other girls paled in how challenging they were compared to her. James didn't think this was problematic in the least – he never promised the girls he was with more than what he was willing to give them right that moment, and he thought it went understood that he was far too young to be tied down to anyone but _the one_ at sixteen years of age. A month or two was plenty of time to let things run their course, and he saw nothing wrong with it. That a few of the girls were left with broken hearts after that – well, that was their problem for having unreasonable expectations of the relationship, thinking that just because he was interested in them, they'd somehow 'bagged' him for life. There was one girl who had that privilege, and when she finally saw sense, James knew he was going to be content for the remainder of his life. This way, he could explore to his heart's content, with nothing pesky like guilt coming in the way.

That was the amazing thing of getting together with Athenora Adelmann this summer. She was three years older than James, clearly even more experienced than he was, and just as carefree about labelling what they had going. More than that, she knew exactly what she was doing in bed, not needing any sort of direction or encouragement like a lot of the girls James had been with did. In fact, for maybe the first time in his life since those fumbling beginnings with Veruca, James was the one in the position of the less experienced partner, and Athenora certainly didn't see any need to hide this fact from him, to save his pride or for any other reason.

The first time they fooled around, after their beach outing, James felt flat-footed through most of it, because every time he tried to move the whole thing to the actual sex part, Athenora would find some way of derailing him, manhandling him into using his mouth on different parts of her body or distracting him by putting hers on different parts of his. To his utter embarrassment, in the end, he came during a possibly accidental tit-wank that felt more like an after-thought to Athenora's enthusiastic attempts at leaving bruises all over his chest and stomach with her mouth, caught utterly by surprise. He got through it half in shock, half in mortification, because how was that for reminding this gorgeous, assertive girl that her partner was a hormonal teenager who obviously couldn't help himself even when he tried. But all Athenora did was lift her eyebrow, offer him a knowing smirk, and ask him if he'd ever been taught how to properly pleasure a girl. Then she proceeded to explain to him exactly this in the most practical terms possible, so that by the end of it he'd mostly forgotten about his own faux pas.

To be fair, James had never really considered the myriad of ways in which physical pleasure usually came – getting off had always been the primary goal of these sorts of activities, and he'd been assuming that women were just as easy to satisfy as he was, that sex was enough for both parties. Apparently not, because the first time they properly shagged, after he'd finished and rolled to rest on his back, Athenora only gave him a minute to catch his breath before demanding he finish her off, and when James made a comment about how he was sure she could use a breather as much as he could, she rolled her eyes at him, called him a self-absorbed boy who was too ignorant for his own good, and then completely ignored him while she did the work herself. James was so insulted he stormed out of the room and stewed for the next few hours, until it came to him that if he'd had any remaining hopes of proving that he was more mature than that first afternoon had demonstrated, he'd thoroughly dashed them now.

The next day, he came back to Athenora to apologise for acting like a prick but that he still wasn't getting what it was he'd done wrong. She informed him that no, women didn't, in fact, automatically climax when men did, and that if this was what he'd been doing since he'd first started shagging, then he'd been leaving a lot of unsatisfied partners in his wake.

The whole thing really sat badly with him, because on the one hand, James was vain enough to find this accusation insulting, and both selfish and self-centred enough to feel that it wasn't fair that apparently women needed so much more effort in order to come than men did and the burden of it always fell on men, and on the other, he wasn't so totally inconsiderate that he didn't care at all whether or not his partner had gotten what they'd signed up for out of the experience.

"There isn't much I can do about helping you if you don't want to be doing it," Athenora pointed out, apparently having correctly figured out what was on his mind. "But it's not cool, James; a lot of girls who are raised conservatively will never think to demand satisfaction from their partners, and they think what you usually do is it, so they come out of it not really understanding what sex should really feel like. It's not a requirement for every single time you fuck someone; sometimes it's about scratching only one person's itch, and the other isn't in the mood for it but does it anyway, and that's also fine. Sex isn't supposed to be this big obligation of reciprocity. But it's also not supposed to be only about one person, either. I can get off just as well by myself, so why would I want to constantly engage with unsatisfying partners who take because that's what they think they're entitled to, and that it doesn't obligate them to give back? That some girls don't understand this is the truth is almost criminal; it goes to show how we treat women in our societies, for all that we love to espouse how gender equality was something we had over our No-Maj counterparts back when they were fighting for women's rights."

James still needed a few days to wrap his head around the whole damn thing, to readjust his views and expectations. He constantly came back to the fact that it didn't matter how much or how little he cared about all those other girls enjoying themselves, he still cared a great deal about Lily, and if he was going to keep her, that doubtful part of him that Athenora had awoken argued, he needed to be able to satisfy her properly. Lily was progressive and open-minded to all these kinds of things, she wasn't like those quiet, submissive daughters of old wizarding houses who were going to marry another Pure-blood and have his children, she wasn't going to settle for being anything less than what she intended to be – it was one of those things that made her stand out in the sea of adolescent Hogwarts residents, made her the perfect woman, the _it_ girl. So he'd do what he had to, to keep her, and really, when he got right down to it, it wasn't much skin off his back anyway – the more he paid attention to the instructions Athenora gave him while they were at it, the more he noticed just how much her obvious enjoyment in the whole thing fed into his own, because when he made her fall apart so unabashedly, he knew that it was _his_ doing, that he was the one responsible for it, in control, and it was somewhat like that feeling of scoring a perfect hoop with a Bludger on his tail, that wild feeling of triumph that had the stands screaming and on their feet, the feeling of being on top of the world.

It was something he was learning to really believe was, for the most part, worth the effort.

* * *

" _Martine has found us a small flat_ ," Petunia said, voice slightly tinny as it went through the antique receiver, " _We will be going to see it with Mum and Mr Dalloway next week._ "

"Let me know how it looks," Lily answered. "You're sure you don't want to enrol in a degree program?"

" _Of course not; I_ _'_ _ve told you that a dozen times already, Lily, and Mum approves_."

"Yes, I remember. Well, ok then, I just wanted to check. I think you'd do quite well at uni, is all."

" _Yes, Father has said that to me several times, and it does not appeal any more when you say it than when he did._ "

"Have you spoken to him at all?"

" _About how sorry he is for what he_ _'_ _s done to Mum and to us?_ " Petunia asked derisively.

"Actually..." licking her lips, Lily debated a moment with herself before ploughing on, "he told me that if I – and you too – couldn't handle it, he'd try again with Mum to make their marriage work."

" _Oh, that,_ " her sister replied, huffing somewhat shakily. " _Yes, he_ _'_ _s spoken to me about that._ "

"And? What did you tell him?"

" _I told him we_ _'_ _re all better off without him, and to make certain he takes the blame in court and not try to besmirch Mum in any way._ "

Exhaling sharply, Lily rubbed her forehead, resting it on the rough tree bark. "I know what he did was wrong, Pet, but he's not like that, he'd not _do_ something like that."

" _Wrong doesn_ _'_ _t begin to cover it, Lily. He betrayed Mum, he betrayed this family, and he_ _'_ _s not even sorry._ _He wouldn_ _'_ _t be doing it if he were_."

Merlin, but she always kept forgetting how immovable her sister was when she'd made up her mind.

" _What did_ you _tell him?_ "

"That I don't know what I want. I still don't know what to do, actually," she admitted.

" _He_ _'_ _ll do what he wants regardless, just so you know._ "

"He won't," Lily said back. "He's not like that."

" _Two weeks ago, you wouldn_ _'_ _t have thought that he could cheat on Mum, either._ "

Tears welled in Lily's eyes, and she dug the heel of her palm into the left one. The words stabbed at her gut.

"Let's not talk about this anymore," she declared, clearing her throat and straightening. "I have to get back, I still have to make breakfast for us."

" _All right._ "

"I'll talk to you tomorrow, then. Bye, Pet."

" _Goodbye, Lily._ "

Lowering the receiver gently onto its archaic pronged cradle, Lily took a moment to clear her mind by focusing instead on the silliness of the setup that was an ancient telephone built into a tree trunk right on the other side of the wards – electricity didn't conduct easily through most warding, which meant that the cottage telephone line had to be set up in the manner of a phone booth in the middle of the forest, with a chime ringing out in the cottage when the telephone rang. The first time Petunia had called, she'd rung off before Lily had managed to get to the telephone, and after a round of phone tag, they'd spent a few minutes being thoroughly amused over the setup, which had served well in greasing the new mode of communication between them, as well as hopefully acclimating Petunia just a bit to the magical part of Lily's life.

Both boys were in the kitchen already when she arrived back. Remus was in his pyjamas still, his arm stretched out on the table, pillowing his head as his eyes sluggishly moved over the page of a book (and how in the hell did he manage to read from that angle without getting a headache, Lily had no idea). Severus, meanwhile, was bent over a cauldron, clearly focused on counting out the stirs, his greasy hair haphazardly tied back so that strands were hanging over his eyes, and he was dressed for the beach already, the black swimming trunks and the green shirt she'd gotten him.

She took a moment to study both of them and marvel at how different they looked from the usual. Remus looked healthier than she'd ever seen him, his skin having acquired a surprisingly deep tan and his hair having grown lighter from sandy brown to almost dirty blonde in the sun. It did mean that his scars stood out all the more starkly – and having seen him without his shirt on, Lily now knew how shockingly many there were – but unlike Severus, who had never once removed his tee-shirt, even when swimming, Remus seemed to be resigned, if not comfortable, with his own skin imperfections. Maybe it was because in his case, his face already reflected it enough that the rest didn't make any difference; Lily had seen Severus without a shirt only once in her life, three years ago when he'd stayed at their place over a long weekend and she'd accidentally stumbled onto him in the bathroom, and it had been enough for her to understand, even at thirteen, that getting roughed up at home by his father was not a one-off, but rather the norm.

(She'd needed a few days to truly figure out what it was that she'd seen – there was nothing so distinctive as scarring from a whipping or being beaten with a belt, but Severus _did_ have a scattering of various kinds of scars that could tell a more-or-less coherent story, if one knew what to look for, and if one knew that for all his gangliness, Severus was not in the least bit clumsy.)

The change in Severus was a bit subtler, but just as stark – it was in the way he seemed to have relaxed into the beach look, no longer self-conscious and awkward about wearing somewhat tight swimming shorts, or about rolling up the sleeves of his tee onto his shoulders; it was in the way he seemed to be accustoming himself to tying his hair back, making him look like less like a boy hiding and more like a young man aiming for a specific look; it was in the way his skin was no longer pasty white and his shoulders no longer quite so hunched, in the way he seemed freer with the tone of his voice, in how he didn't seem to mind as much that his back was to Remus, allowing his focus to turn so fully to his brewing that he forgot himself, so completely in his element.

 _Confidence suits you_.

Her stomach dropped a bit in a whoop, and she licked her bottom lip, tugged on the raspy skin of it with her teeth as she opened the screen door and averted her eyes to the ice box powered by cooling charms and stasis magic, considering their meals for the day.

"How was your talk with your sister?" Remus asked, voice rough with residual sleepiness.

"All right; she talked mostly about her move to London. She's going with one of her oldest school friends."

"Martine Dalloway?" Severus piped up.

"Yup. The Dalloways are family friends," Lily explained to Remus, "Martine is Petunia's age, and Marissa is a year younger than me, though she's smart enough that she was my year in school. Their mother died of cancer soon after I started Hogwarts, but Mum and Dad stayed close with Mr Dalloway. Well, Mum more than Dad, I suppose; Mr Dalloway is an architect but he works from home, so he and Mum usually meet up for tea and scones and such while Dad's at uni. You know, I've not really seen Marissa properly in years," she added musingly. "Maybe I should get back in touch with her."

"And say what?" Severus asked dryly.

"That her planned profession is to fight evil wizards?" Remus suggested.

Lily rolled her eyes. "Yes, because obfuscation is really a skill that neither of you have heard of."

"No, just one you might not be very good at, I believe."

She took the time to turn to Remus and stick her tongue out at him, and he laughed mirthfully in response.

Severus found twenty minutes in his busy brewing schedule to join them for breakfast, but declared that he couldn't leave his brews unattended until he was done, so Lily and Remus agreed to stay at the cottage with him. Remus took the time to clean the cottage thoroughly so that he'd not have as much work for their last full day tomorrow, while Lily decided to play assistant to Severus, falling easily into rhythm with him. Within fifteen minutes, she found herself feeling genuinely invigorated, because they hadn't done this in quite a while – while they always partnered in Potions, Slughorn's curriculum was very far from exciting, and Severus could do it in his sleep, so there never was any fulfilment to it; brewing complex potions, on the other hand, allowed them to debate tweaking without Severus falling into the deaf focus he always had when inventing and which always left Lily beyond frustrated with him.

The potions his mother was having him make were N.E.W.T. curriculum for the most part, a bit on the expensive side if one were to want to buy them, but usually worth the price given the tediousness of preparation. Severus was on the last leg of the brewing process, which required supervision but not too much investment of mental acumen, and so could explain some of the modifications he'd made to them. The grasp and perception he had of the brewing process usually left Lily breathless if she thought about it too hard; she was good at improvising with ingredients, but the technical side of things had always entered and left her brain without much retention of anything, so listening to Severus explain why he chose to flip the direction of his stirring or induce instability to the temperature at certain points left her at the same time fascinated and deeply dissatisfied for knowing she hadn't managed to actually learn anything applicable.

"So, is the moonshine finally done?" she asked him when she'd grown tired of his little lecture.

"I'll be ready for consumption tonight, yes," Severus replied, eying her with a dubious expression. "You are really going to drink hard liquor?"

"I'm sixteen and I've never gotten drunk in my life; there's a first time for everything, and it's past time for this one," she replied primly, then grinned and wiggled her eyebrows. "It'll be fun."

"That's not my experience with alcohol," Severus muttered, shaking his head, and Lily winced.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply– if you don't want to do it, you don't have to, you know."

"And have you and the wolf do something stupid like go skinny-dipping in the middle of the night because you were too pissed to see what a colossally idiotic idea something like that would be?" he scoffed. "Unlike you, I've done this before, Lily."

"You have?"

"Of course. You don't get to sixth year in Slytherin without knowing how to handle your liquor."

"That... well, I'd say that would be disturbing, except Gryffindor isn't any better either," she had to admit. "With us, it's mostly not reaching sixth year without having caused some sort of bodily fluid accident at least once in your life."

"Merlin, you Gryffindors can be disgusting," he said, face screwing in disgust, and Lily wanted very much to be able to disagree with him. Unfortunately, she'd seen the consequences of one of the Gryffindor parties gone out of control when contraband had been smuggled in, and it was neither pleasant not defensible.

"Usually it's just puke – actually, no, I thought it only _was_ puke until I became a prefect. _That_ _'_ _s your fault, Remus!_ " she hollered, leaning the chair back while holding onto the table in order to direct her voice to the living room.

" _We agreed never to speak of that incident, Lily! Merlin, have mercy, would you!_ " he shot back, and when, legs of her chair thumping lightly back onto the floor, Lily turned her gaze back to Severus, he had his eyebrows lifted in mild disbelief.

"Do I even want to know?"

"Trust me, you really, really don't. Suffice it to say that the youngest prefects always get the worst jobs around Gryffindor."

"One thing we have in common, then."

They shared a knowing smile and fell silent, Severus turning to focus on bottling one of the potions that had reached completion in the last two minutes. Lily watched as he made a graceful arc in the air with his wand. The cauldron rose over the standardised vials, tipping over gently to fill them with the teal liquid, and the polished length of black wood caught her attention.

"I never asked you, how's the new wand working out for you?"

"It's better than the last one. It is quite a bit more powerful, but I find most magic easier to perform with it."

"Most?"

"Admittedly, some spells are somewhat harder than they used to be," Severus said. "Certain Dark spells, for the most part, but I've run into one or two simpler ones, as well."

"Did you ever look into the differences?"

"Wandmakers are notoriously secretive about their craft, and the Ollivanders are the best in the business exactly because they do not share their findings with the rest of the world – though I have heard that there is one book on the topic at least. Unfortunately, there are no copies in the Hogwarts library."

"Dumbledore might be able to help with that."

"He might," Severus agreed noncommittally.

"Do you think I could try it out? Your wand, I mean."

Severus blinked in startlement and looked at her with eyes that were a bit too wide than they should have been, making Lily frown.

"I mean, I know that's sort of personal, but, well, I mean, we did try out each other's wands when we first got them, so I thought..." She trailed off, feeling wrong-footed and suddenly hot in the face.

"No, I... You're right, we did do it when we were eleven. I suppose–"

"What are you two talking about?" Remus' voice made them both jump and earned them suspicious looks, but it also served very effectively to distract them from the awkward topic Lily had stumbled onto.

"Home-brewed moonshine," Lily almost blurted out.

"Oh, right; hence the mentioning of the incident," Remus said, making a face. "Still, we _are_ getting sloshed tonight?"

"As far as I know the schedule," Severus confirmed with a roll of his eyes. "But if you attempt to skinny-dip, I will personally glue your trunks to your arse, wolf."

"Not that kind of drunk, Snape," Remus answered with an eye-roll of his own, though he followed that up with a toothy grin that momentarily made Severus go very, very still. "And you're welcome to try."

"You're on, Lupin."

"Oh, Merlin save me from teenaged boys," Lily muttered, burying her head in the palm of her hand, though she did have to fight the sniggers that wanted to escape, happiness bubbling to the surface for the first time in ten days at the thought that they'd all gotten far enough to joke without someone taking it the wrong way.

There was hope for these two yet.

* * *

 **A/N:** For those who might not have seen my comment the previous chapter: I love answering reviews and debating or explaining things, so I really do want you to feel free to communicate with me. For those of you who really wish to talk to me but for whatever reason don't or can't have an account here on ffnet - I detest answering reviews in chapters, because it annoys me personally when I read a story, and the comments also add to my word count, which I'd prefer to keep as close to minimal as possible. So if you don't mind Archive of our Own (AO3), I'm crossposting the story and you're welcome to review there (and read wherever, of course), where I can respond to your reviews in the comments section (and you don't need to have an account there either to comment). It's visible to everyone reading the story, yes, but then it'd also be if I were to answer in the following chapter here on ffnet. Typing in the story name, author name and 'ao3' into google should get you there.


	28. Ch II,24: To Shift the Balance

**Chapter 24: To Shift the Balance**

Hangovers were a bitch.

Also, the world hated her.

Right this second, she hated the world back with just as much passion.

Moaning at the drumroll in her head, Lily buried her face in the pillow, bemoaning that her arms were too heavy to flip the pillow over her head for some blissful darkness. Her eyes felt like they were crusted over so badly she'd never be able to open them again, and her stomach was roiling queasily. Her mouth was dry enough that it felt like it was filled with coarse cotton, and that was the worst part.

Yeah, ok, getting drunk just to be able to say she'd gotten drunk hadn't been worth it in the least, no matter what they'd done last night on the beach... not that she could recall any of it just this moment.

The sound of the door opening was thankfully quiet enough that she didn't flinch, though it was a near thing. She moaned again and tried to burrow her head under the edge of the pillow, and someone was kind enough to help her out in the endeavour, so that she sighed when the light was no longer stinging her eyelids, even if breathing had suddenly become a bit more difficult.

"I brought the Hanger Over," Severus said very softly, following it up with some sort of clink that it took Lily three seconds to realize was the sound of a potion vial being placed on the nightstand. "You feel up to joining us downstairs?"

Lily moaned again and tried to go back to sleep, without much success. When she finally felt like her brain wasn't going to mush inside her head, she emerged from under the pillow, groping blindly for the vial and managing to knock it down onto the carpet, so that she had to scoot to the edge of the bed and let her arm fall off the mattress to sweep her fingers over the carpet, trying valiantly all this time to keep the sunlight from reaching anywhere near her eyes.

At least there was this: Severus was _incredible_ about brewing, and Lily had never appreciated this fact more in her _life_ than right now, when the Hanger Over he'd brewed for all of them yesterday began working almost the second she chugged it down; it wasn't going to be getting rid of her hangover completely, but it quieted the drumming in her head almost immediately, settled her stomach, and let her feel more energetic about getting out of bed – given that she'd felt like a freighter train had run her over, that she could lift her head off her pillow seemed like a minor miracle.

Also, apparently, she was in her pyjamas. She did not remember getting into her pyjamas last night.

Padding groggily down the stairs, Lily found her two companions nursing their own hangovers – what was left of them, anyway – with coffee in their mugs and tired expressions on their faces.

"Morning."

"Some kind, at least," Severus muttered back, while Remus went with: "Morning, Lils."

"Coffee. I _need_ coffee."

A finger pointed her in the right direction, and her brain refused to acknowledge anything else as she scooped up the cup oh-so-thoughtfully prepared and laid out on the counter.

"Merlin, I love you guys _so much_ ," she almost moaned as she took a big gulp of the coffee and fairly dropped herself onto her chair at the kitchen table, her stomach and head protesting. "Next time I get the bright idea to try new things, you know, like drugs maybe, stop me before I regret it."

Remus sniggered, while Severus groaned and let his head fall to the table.

"Aren't we a sorry bunch," her Gryffindor friend decided chirpily.

"God, stop being cheerful at me," Lily demanded. " _How_ are you so cheerful?"

"Experience, Lily; _long_ , debauched experience," Remus answered her, while Severus straightened in his seat and ran his hand over his face before pinching the corners of his eyes for a moment.

"You don't remember anything from last night?" he asked.

"It's still too fuzzy."

"Turns out, the little cheater didn't get as tanked as we did."

"Hey, not true," Remus protested. "I was just smart enough to drink plenty of water before bed. I tried to get you two to do it, but..." He shrugged. "The trick is in the two litres of water."

"I hate alcohol," Severus muttered, burying his fingers in his hair.

"What did we even _do_ last night?" Lily had to ask.

"You went skinny-dipping," Severus accused her flatly. "I told you not to do it, but you did it anyway."

Remus burst into giggles, burying his head into his arms on the table. Lily moaned.

"Christ. Did you stick my bathing suit onto me?"

"He was too uncoordinated to do it," Remus supplied, still laughing. "Not that he didn't try. We had to fish you out of the sea, cause you wanted to have a splash fight. You're a happy drunk, apparently."

She stank of ethanol and sweat and the sea. Her skin felt tight and just a bit itchy, and her hair was dried into stiff ropes tied haphazardly back.

Lily moaned again, head banging against her arms folded on the table as the frankly humiliating memory of it came back to her. Including parts that made her question herself.

"Did we all skinny-dip?"

Severus groaned. Remus burst into another bout of giggles.

"You were insistent. He couldn't resist. I wasn't gonna get left out."

The table jerked as Severus swung his foot under it to kick Remus, sending him such a black look that for a stupid moment, Lily thought it'd conjure a thundercloud over their heads that'd shoot a lightning and strike Remus dead.

Goddamn, and she didn't remember what the boys looked like naked. She remembered convincing Severus to do it – he was a mean drunk, probably like his father, but he'd not been mean to her, just to Remus – and Remus joined in because... some vague reason.

She remembered why she'd done it, maybe. She'd never seen a boy naked, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Severus had been the one to suggest it first, or so her brain had told her at the time.

It did _not_ seem like such a good idea now.

And she didn't even remember what they looked like. She didn't remember whether there were any new scars on Severus' back. She didn't remember the tan lines of Remus' shorts. She didn't remember whether she'd paid any attention to their pricks, or how they might differ.

She suddenly wondered how much they remembered of her body, whether either of them remembered the shape of her pubic hair, or that her areolae were too large for her liking.

Probably not, if she didn't remember much of anything, either. That thought was a relief.

She remembered having more fun than she'd had in months. She remembered feeling _good_.

"Is that the worst of it, then?" she asked the boys, feeling a bit more buoyant now that her headache was mostly gone and the coffee had started powering her system, and she remembered feeling euphorically like a little kid, with no cares in the world, who didn't see anything at all racy or questionable about running around starkers in the sea with two boys.

"Pretty much," Severus confirmed.

"You wanted us all to take a shower together, but we vetoed that," Remus informed her, looking completely unrepentant about it when Lily felt blood drain out of her face.

Severus kicked him again under the table.

"He's twisting it; you wanted a shower and I wouldn't let you do it alone, because you were too drunk. You could have fallen and broken your neck. You pouted at me and said you didn't care if you needed help, you felt disgusting and wanted a shower. _He_ made a rather tasteless joke about showering together and the water shortage this summer."

Lily swung her foot at the leg of Remus' chair, making him cackle at her again.

"What is _with_ you?" she asked him crossly.

"He's the outgoing drunk," Severus explained. "Also, he's had some more this morning."

"Hair of the dog," Remus declared, lifting his coffee mug. "It's my furry problem, see? My metabolism is faster, I burn through it more efficiently."

"Well, whatever it is, I'm going to get my damn shower now. I've waited this long for it," Lily declared, draining her coffee mug in one last big swallow. "Then I'm going to go back to sleep for another few hours, and we're _never_ going to talk about this again, yeah?" That decided, she nodded a little to herself and got back to her feet, already thinking of how glorious that shower was going to feel. A couple of steps towards the kitchen entrance, and Lily stopped, another thought lodging in her brain. "If I was too drunk for a shower, and we went skinny-dipping, how did I end up dressed in my pyjamas this morning?"

The way that both boys suddenly turned into relatively convincing human interpretation of flaming tomatoes was already more information than she wanted to know.

She still laughed in the shower at the ridiculousness of the whole thing – and perhaps with just a bit of the reckless teenage exhilaration that propelled those her age to do stupid, experimental things with the members of the opposite sex.

* * *

One thing that Sirius couldn't abide by in Grimmauld Place were unexpected events. So long as he knew roughly what to expect from each member of the household, he had a way of handling everyday life with minimal number of moments marked by uncontrollable panic or unintentional vulnerability. He knew how to be just rude enough to anger his mother, but not so rude as to be punished severely enough he couldn't handle it. He knew how to be obedient enough to keep his father pleased with him. He knew how to provoke his grandfather into causing a ruckus without it coming back to bite him in the arse. He knew how much he could unload on his brother without Regulus becoming moody enough to try and guilt him for it. He even knew how to handle the extended family – stay out of their way unless he wanted to end up in a lecture from his uncle, be inundated with scornful criticism from his aunt, or have to contend with his cousin's condescending comments.

What he didn't know how to handle was the unexpected appearance of the screechy voice that swung between mockingly sing-song and whiny, ringing shrilly from the front hallway all the way up to his room and making his stomach descend past his boots.

"Oh, baby cousin, why, it's been _such_ a long time!"

The sudden, overwhelming urge to hide under his own bed started clawing in Sirius' gut with such force that he had to stop in his step and close his eyes so tightly shut colourful spots started appearing in his blackened vision. Merlin, but if there was one person in the extended family that he _could not stand_ , it was Bellatrix Black. Her demeanour grated on him in the worst possible way, making icy tingling crawl up and down his spine every time he was in her presence, and where he loved Andromeda and tolerated Narcissa, he fought all-out wars with Bellatrix, verbal or otherwise, when they ran into each other. It didn't happen often, she detested this place (no doubt because it reminded her that she was from a junior branch of the family), but back when Sirius had been a child and Bellatrix a teenager – the nine-year age difference hadn't made a bit of difference to her, and Sirius' pride hadn't let him back down no matter how much older and more experienced she'd been – even Orion himself had needed to get involved at least twice in their scuffles so as to prevent irreparable damage to their surroundings. Naturally, after she'd basically sold herself off to the Lestranges in order to gain access to Voldemort's inner circle, it had become beneath her to actually physically clash with her baby cousin, but Sirius remembered perfectly well just how vicious she could be in a fight, with or without magic. When the rumours had started up that she was the first female to be accepted in the Dark Lord's inner circle, Sirius had had absolutely zero problems believing it, or for that matter believing that she was perfectly capable of doing the darkest types of things that ascribed to the Death Eaters.

He shut his Muggle motorcycle magazine contraband and made sure the door to his room was locked before going downstairs, knowing there was very little chance he'd manage to avoid coming face to face with his hateful cousin and wanting to get it over with as soon as possible – it was almost time for lunch, and given how often Bellatrix's parents were in residence these days, dining with them had become normal recourse more than anything else.

"And there's the problem child," was Bellatrix's first gleeful comment when Sirius had descended enough for their eyes to meet, making his nostrils flare in a flash of anger.

She was dressed in black, as was her usual, her wild hair barely teased into any semblance of order. Her dark, heavy-lidded eyes were cold and cruel and mocking as they tried to stare into Sirius' soul, and the only thing that he could ever think about them was that there was nothing real in their depths, nothing _right_.

He had never, ever understood how it was that he was the only one who could see this, who could tell – Bellatrix was as empty as a hollowed shell, a mimic who pretended at being human. She was soulless, and that lent her a very specific edge of danger that burrowed in Sirius' psyche in a unique way wholly separate from the feelings his other relatives inspired in him. And now that his Animagic had strengthened his animalistic instinct, he could tell even better that she was dangerous in a way that not many other people were, Walburga Black included. She didn't see any of them as her equal, as probably even close to the same _species_ , and those lines that Sirius knew even his mother, violent as she was, wouldn't cross, he didn't think those lines _existed_ for Bellatrix.

"To what do we owe this unpleasant surprise?" he sneered at her in spite of his newly sharpened feelings, having never backed down from one of her attacks, and not planning to, either. Reckless, perhaps, but cowering would make things even worse, he thought.

Bellatrix gave him a fake, bright smile that looked hungry.

"It's my sister's wedding; I've come to offer assistance, of course."

"You, assistance? Please," Sirius retorted, rolling his eyes as dramatically as he could. "What a load of horseshite."

"Why, don't we have a potty mouth? Best make sure Aunt Walburga doesn't hear you, Siri. You wouldn't want to be put in the corner, would you?"

"Fuck off," he growled back, shouldering past her into the drawing room, where the female section of the family contingent all seemed to be gathered. They were drinking tea, from what he could tell, Walburga sitting in the high-back chair acting like some queen holding court, while Druella and Narcissa were situated on the settee next to each other, looking prim and proper and very absorbed in their perusal of some photographs or other. The men were absent, but then given that Bellatrix was here, that had to mean at least one of the Lestrange brothers was also in attendance, and it was quite possible Orion had sequestered himself with him and, possibly, also Cygnus and Arcturus, though the latter two were less likely. Would they have taken Regulus in, too?

"Look what the cat dragged in," Bellatrix said, moving dramatically to take a seat on a sofa chair and pick up her cup of tea. His back still tingling, Sirius frowned and turned his head a bit, finding that Regulus was actually flanking him and observing the situation with shrewd eyes. In his focus on Bellatrix, Sirius had not even noticed his own brother standing in the hallway, but he must have been, because why else would Bellatrix have been lingering there in the first place?

"Your lessons with your father will be postponed today," Walburga declared firmly. "He has business to discuss with Rodolphus. You are to make yourselves useful to the elves and begin preparing the seating cards."

Oh, wonderful, _more_ writing.

"Yes, Mother," Regulus dutifully said, before tugging Sirius with him by the back of his robes. Sirius followed without too much complaining, though he made sure to tug his clothing out of Regulus' grasp firmly enough to send a clear message to his brother. They settled themselves in the second floor library and began the tedious job of writing out all of the guest names on little pieces of paper, Sirius taking over the paper cutting and folding while Regulus handled the actual writing. It was a familiar enough activity, they'd been pretty much designated paper boys in the last month, but Sirius couldn't relax into it, feeling antsy and wanting to move.

"What the hell is she even doing here?" he muttered in the end, glaring ineffectually at the door.

"Rodolphus barely greeted anyone before he and Father shut themselves in his study, and Lucius is here, too," Regulus noted, eying Sirius in a wary, watchful fashion. "Try to avoid her if you can."

"I'll do what I damn well please in my own house – _she_ can't dictate what I do," Sirius hissed back.

"She's Cissy's sister; it's a minor miracle she's not been in before today."

"Oh, please, as if she cares about Narcissa's wedding. She didn't give a fuck about her _own_ wedding beyond bossing everyone around, or don't you remember?"

"Probably because the marriage was arranged."

"By _her_ ," Sirius pointed out. "You know she'd only chosen him because of his father's connection to You-Know-Who." Sirius didn't give a sodding shit about using the name 'Voldemort', but the rules at Grimmauld Place were different, and he was _not_ going to call that man 'the Dark Lord', not on his _life_. So, 'You-Know-Who' it was.

"Also, because he's the head of one of the oldest, most respected Wizarding families in Britain," Regulus reminded.

" _Now_. He was the heir back then." Sirius had an idea on how that had come about, one he thought was quite plausible, all things considered. It most certainly involved his cousin putting her long, cruel fingers in it. "Anyway, the whole thing was only a way for her to act like the centre of the universe for the summer; it's Cissy's turn now, so why the hell would she even want to pretend to participate?"

"She's still here, so you might as well not cause any scenes," Regulus retorted testily. "You're not the only one who dislikes having to deal with her, you know."

That was one of the rare things he and Reggie could agree on – neither of them could really stand her, though Regulus was usually better at pretending not to be very bothered by the way she obviously babied them in order to humiliate them.

Unfortunately, it seemed that either Bellatrix either was bored or else she wanted to vent some, because forty-five minutes later she was walking into the library with a gleam in her eyes that promised nothing good.

"Are you having fun?" she asked, sitting down grandly in one of the sofa chairs.

"As if you care," Sirius replied with a roll of his eyes. "Got bored with the henhouse?"

"All that clucking was going on my nerves," she confirmed brightly. "Thought I might come up here, see if I can make you growl or hiss some instead." When Sirius didn't respond but instead clenched his jaw tightly shut and focused on the little slips of cardboard paper in front of him, she continued: "You always did love your animal metaphors, didn't you, Cousin? Which would you be, then? Not a wet cat, that's our dear Reggie; a mangy cur, maybe? You do have such appalling lack of manners, after all, and you tend to bite any hand that tries to pet you. And, of course, your dear mother even named you as such, didn't she, _Sirius_."

"Are you smarting that they'd not let you into the big boys' room?"

The words weren't planned, but she'd hit far too close to the truth for comfort, and Sirius did have a tendency to leap before looking. Anyway, it was equal parts fascinating and terrifying to watch the way her mocking, amused expression morphed into one of sharp anger. Regulus kicked him in the shin for that.

"You have no idea where I'm welcome, _Cousin_ ," she spat at him. "Places you can't even imagine. The magic that I've learned there. I don't give a shit about your father's little schemes, not when I am granted access to the _real_ places of power."

"That's n–"

"Do those places require you to spread your legs? Because I don't see how else you'd have gotten access to them," Sirius replied brashly, feeling reckless and itchy under his skin. It always felt like this, whenever he was confronted with his hateful cousin, the need to move and _do_ , the need to strike before she had a chance to, to do _something_ other than meekly submit. Not to her, not ever.

He knew it wouldn't get to anything good for him; it never had, after all. But Sirius had never had very good self-control, and what little he did possess was limited to only two people in the world, those who had the most power over him. Bellatrix sodding Black certainly wasn't one of those two.

It was still immensely satisfying in the moment to watch Bellatrix's face contort in fury as she jumped off the seat she'd taken and pulled out her wand. Sirius mirrored her actions, of course, he wasn't stupid, but before any curses could begin flying about, Regulus had inserted himself between the two of them, his back to Sirius, hands raised conciliatorily.

"Do forgive him, Cousin," Sirius' younger brother said in a gentle, almost crooning voice. "He's jealous; the buggering idiot can't help himself."

"Jealous? Ha! Of what?"

Regulus' elbow dug into Sirius' side and he huffed from the spike of pain that elicited.

"Shut _up_ , Siri," Regulus hissed at him.

"You need your little brother to think for you, how pathetic," Bellatrix sneered, grinning triumphantly in a way that made Sirius bare his teeth at her savagely, no doubt just adding fuel to the fire of her beloved animal comparisons.

"Is that supposed to mean something coming from you? You're hanging onto your little sister's skirts for any scrap of attention you can get. Poor dear Trixie, the women don't need her and the boys don't want her, for all the diseased-cunt-showing she does. Whatever _shall_ you do, Trix?"

Jumping out of the way of the dark blue streak of an unknown curse was more instinct than anything else, but his instincts had become heightened ever since he'd mastered turning into a dog. He tumbled behind the sofa he'd been sitting on, flipped back onto his knees and shot a Conjunctivitis Curse over the sofa backrest, aiming for painful and debilitating though he knew there was no way that Bellatrix would hold herself back from using Dark Magic. Another curse flew just half an inch from his wand hand, and Sirius hissed at the heat of it, heart beating wildly in his chest as he scrambled for a better position. There was noise in the background, distant and indistinct, but it wasn't coming from Bellatrix, and so Sirius' mind dismissed it without conscious input; it was irrelevant – the only relevant thing was what bastardised Latin words were coming out of Bellatrix's mouth and how she was moving.

Sirius fired off a Stunner to cover himself as he jumped over a bit of exposed space and ducked behind a heavy wooden bookshelf, thanking his ancestors for having enough books to necessitate some unconventional furniture arrangement in the large room. Just in time, too, as a flash of angry red light whizzed past his thigh but missed.

He counted to three before peeking out from behind the bookshelf and his face smacked into a rubbery, translucent barrier hard enough to knock him off his feet. Heart in his throat, he scrambled upright, just as an authoritative, craggy voice declared: "Enough!"

Breathing heavily, Sirius turned to inspect the room, wincing at the scorch marks and the upturned furniture, at a cut on Regulus' temple bleeding sluggishly and the identical bubble that was holding in a raging Bellatrix. And by the door stood his grandfather Arcturus with his spine straight and his wand unholstered out of his walking stick, looking more imposing than Sirius had ever seen him.

"Shame on the both of you," he said angrily, stepping towards them. "How dare you raise your wands in this house, you insolent wretches!"

"Let me go, you old fool, before I make you," Bellatrix hissed at him, and Arcturus pointed his wand at her. The shriek she released pushed Sirius' heartbeat into the stratosphere, and he suddenly couldn't get enough air.

"Learn your place, foolish girl," the old wizard ordered harshly, leaving her to gasp on the floor as he turned to Regulus; Sirius didn't register much more than that, with his vision darkening at the edges and his legs shaking so badly he thought he was going to fall straight to the floor. And worse still was the sapping of colour around him, familiar and usually comforting, and this could not, _could not_ be happening right now, he was _not_ going to let that part of him take over, he was _not_.

In the end, he did have to sit down on the ground, but forcing himself to take as deep breath as he could chased away the colour-blindness and with it the crawl of magic under his skin. The effort left him feeling clammy and cold, and he had to clench his jaw tight to stop his teeth from chattering.

He was in no way prepared for the sharp pain in his ear that forced him to his feet without even really catching his balance, or the looming presence of his grandfather far too close to him. Arcturus kept a firm hold on Sirius' ear, though his wand was pointed at Bellatrix, who was standing where she'd fallen and was giving Arcturus a look of cold contempt.

"Walk," he ordered, and that he didn't have to say 'before I make you' had Sirius stilling in submission under the painful hold, his brain recognising that this man was an unknown quantity, and until he knew how best to behave, keeping still and silent and too alert was the best choice.

Bellatrix did as ordered, her wand clutched in her long-nailed hand so tightly her knuckles were white. At the door she twitched as if she wanted to retaliate, but Arcturus was quicker, smacking her in the back of her head with a spell that made her stumble and moan against her will.

"I said _walk_ ," he ordered, the force in the words interposing his visage in Sirius' mind with Orion's, father and son blurring until he couldn't tell which one was which, and that just made him more desperate and more terrified.

The commotion had brought out the rest of the household into the hallway. Bellatrix began dragging her feet when she caught sight of her husband and Sirius' father, and Arcturus, obviously beyond having lost patience with her, pushed her down the last three steps to sprawl at Rodolphus' feet.

"You will get that wretch out of my house until she learns some manners," Arcturus told the burly man. "I will not suffer her insolence, and I will not allow her to desecrate her sister's most important moment. Her spoiled child tantrums will not be inflicted on this household. She is your wife; discipline her."

Lestrange didn't even glance at Orion before nodding and dragging Bellatrix roughly to her feet by her forearm, yet another shocking occurrence that Sirius couldn't make heads nor tails of. He was shaking now, and he couldn't stop it, because this was all unknown, unexpected, and he didn't know what was going to happen, he couldn't _think_ , he–

He hadn't been this terrified in a long time.

"We will speak on this further at another point, Rodolphus. It seems you have some personal business to attend to," Orion said with deceptive mildness, which was as loud as a dismissal, and everyone present knew it. None of Bellatrix's family said a word, not Cygnus and Druella, and certainly not Narcissa, who all watched the situation with varying levels of alarm and wariness. In the end, the two Lestranges exited the house with the husband dragging the wife, who kept sending murderous looks back at the lot of them, and they Disapparated right from the front step, the door banging shut behind them.

Sirius was tossed on the floor just as unceremoniously as Bellatrix had been, searing pains shooting thorough his released ear and distracting him from noticing at whose feet he'd been delivered.

"Raising children is the woman's responsibility, and you are always so eager to claim that position in this household, _Daughter_. Do your blasted job and get that hooligan under control."

"Oh, I intend to," Walburga said angrily, yanking Sirius to his feet with a spell. He kept his eyes firmly on the ground, tracking everything he could with his peripheral vision, desperate for all this to be over so he could hide under the bed in his room and try to figure out what had happened. When he was propelled towards the kitchen in the basement, for just a moment he felt utter relief, because this was familiar, this was something he could deal with, something he knew how to handle.

Then the dread of what was about to happen came flooding back, sapping what little energy he might have had to fight in whatever way he could.

Subdued, he allowed himself to be manhandled out of his robes as one of the elves multiplied rice on the floor in the corner near the fireplace. The pain was almost comfortingly familiar when he knelt on the rice, joining the throbbing, shooting sparks in his ear, and Sirius bent his head down, shaking and shaking and shaking. He didn't let a cry pass his lips, not when the first curse began constricting the skin on his back until it cracked and bled, not when the second tore at the fingernails on his dominant hand until he knew he'd not be able to hold a wand in the near future without considerable pain, and not when the soles of his feet burned and blistered in agony. He whimpered past clenched teeth, moaned and choked on screams, but he kept his lips glued shut, because that was the only defiance he could ever offer her. And he cried and shook on the excruciatingly painful rice grains digging into his knees, the tears flowing like little rivulets over his nose and between his lips and down his chin, drip drip dripping on the floor, soaking the rice, because those he could not control, so much as he wished.

"The next time you try to ruin Narcissa's summer, I will skin you alive where you stand," that Wretched Woman hissed in his ear when she got tired of the spells, and as he flinched away, Sirius knew she meant every word. "One toe out of line, you little monster, and you will wish I had never borne you."

He wondered, hours later, muzzily, after the elves had treated his wounds and put him to bed, after he'd found the strength to crawl to the door and lock it with his left hand, cradling his right to his chest, after he'd painfully, desperately clawed his way to the dusty space under his bed, too exhausted and in too much pain to turn into his Animagus form but almost panicked for one smudge of safety, unable even to stop the little distressed whimpers and keens from escaping his lips, how it was that she didn't already know he wished that every moment of every day of his life.

 _I wish I'd never been born, too._

* * *

Severus felt jittery. It was a feeling that was hours old, having started the night before, when Lily had swung her bottle of liquor around, sang half-remembered pirate songs they'd picked up on television back before magic had been a thing, and then laughed herself so silly that she'd peed the knickers of her bathing suit enough she'd run into the sea to fully relieve herself and then lobbed those same knickers back towards their sitting spot. It was a feeling that had persisted through the hours afterwards, through the restless, exhausted night and the following morning.

Severus didn't quite remember what all they'd done last night, but he was certain he remembered more than Lily. He had no idea how much Lupin remembered, because who knew how a werewolf's brain might react to the copious amounts of extremely potent rotgut alcohol they'd chugged down, but he fervently hoped it was less than he normally would. Severus did remember that he'd given into her laughing pleas, because that was what she did to him and he may have resented it, but he had been resigned to it for months now. He remembered that it wasn't courage that had gotten him to strip his tee-shirt over his head and pull down the swimming trunks, but the sight of Lupin laughing at Lily's exuberant calls and demands, the challenge in his glassy eyes when they locked with Severus'.

For the first time in two weeks, that challenge had felt like true competition, competition for Lily's romantic love, not just friendship, and Severus could stand – barely, with great difficulty – to share Lily with Lupin as a friend, but he was _not_ going to let the other boy take her away from him, not in that way. It was worse than Potter, too – at least when it came to Potter, there was some assurance, weak as it was, that Lily had no interest in him; Lupin, on the other hand, had become her other best friend almost overnight, and whether he wanted to or not, Severus feared. And when he feared, he did stupid things.

So he'd done the stupid thing and chugged too much liquor down his throat and gotten himself out of his clothes and then run stark naked into the water with Lupin at his heels while Lily had shrieked and laughed in utter happiness the likes of which Severus hadn't heard in _years_. How they'd managed not to drown was still a mystery to him over twelve hours later. They'd dunked each other and tried to make the biggest splash they could, the salt of the sea mixing horribly with the taste of liquor still in their mouths so that they sputtered and spat at each other, and the sight of Lily naked when she finally stumbled out of the water while Severus and Lupin helped prop her up was something that had burned into his brain so strongly it blurred everything else about that night, because how could it _not_ , Severus was sixteen and a teenager like all others, just as horny and hormonal, and he'd imagined it for years, had _yearned_ for it for the past six months in a way he'd never believed existed before he'd begun his sessions with Dumbledore to discover himself. It was something that he knew would stay with him forever; it was also something he knew he'd have to bury so deep inside that Lily could never get a glimpse of it, lest it destroy whatever kind of connection existed between them, hold it close and protect it for himself and for her both. The knowledge _hurt_.

He had no idea how they'd all managed to keep it so utterly innocent in their silly debauchery, but no one had copped any really deliberate feels, and no one had snogged anybody else, and all they'd done in the end was stumble, the three drunk, naked stooges holding onto each other, back into the cottage, to put Lily to bed and then escape to their own rooms before they began a fight that Severus' nasty, drunkard side had wanted to pick with the werewolf.

And now he felt jittery, unsettled by their actions the previous night, by Lily apparently deciding she was going to completely ignore the pink hippogriffs sitting with them on the beach, by the way that sober Lupin didn't seem to be sending the same combative signals that drunk Lupin had been the night before, by the feeling of being scraped raw and exposed even though he was in his tee and swimming trunks, by being sixteen and hopelessly in love and utterly, painfully aware of all those flaws that probably meant Lily would never look at him the way he looked at her.

Closing her book and sitting up, Lily reset her hat on her head and stretched with a soft sigh.

"I'm going into the water; you wanna come with?"

Lupin grumbled and turned his back to her, obviously mostly asleep. Severus licked his lips and decided quickly enough that yes, he was definitely going if Lupin was not. Lily took her hat and sunglasses off and scooted to the edge of her towel to put her flip-flop onto her feet before getting up, smacking the tops of them loudly because her skin was salty and sticky with sweat and the plastic footwear refused to bend to her command. Done, she gave him an expectant look, and that jittery sense that danced within him (and maybe a bit of residual liquor, because Severus may have hated alcohol, but Lupin wasn't the only one with the 'hair of the dog' attitude) made some hidden courage surge upwards. It was nothing she'd not seen before, after all – he'd revealed far too much of himself to her whether she remembered or not, the price paid in kind for the knowledge she'd gifted him with last night – and he dreaded her pity, but at least he knew she'd not judge him for this, never for this, and so he nodded, stood up, and in one swift move, so as to pre-empt second-guessing himself, stripped off his tee to expose his skinny, pale, scarred torso, a stark contrast to his tanned arms and legs and neck, looking no doubt utterly ridiculous.

The smile that grew on Lily's face was slow and wobbly, but it was pure and incredulous and _happy_ , and Severus inhaled a shocked breath at how utterly, terrifyingly _perfect_ that smile made him feel.

Merlin, he'd die for that smile. He'd _kill_ for that smile.

"Race you to the deeps?"

She didn't give him a chance to process her challenge before she was off, and he ran after her, yelling 'no fair' and laughing in spite of himself as they both splashed into the water, because this was a perfect moment, like that one when they were thirteen and he'd chased after her in Manchester and first known what it meant to love like a man, the moment that had finally revealed her Patronus sheltering in his soul, and he didn't even care about anything else.

They made a hard lap; Lily was a strong swimmer, she'd trained as a kid and her butterfly stroke was refined. Severus had only learned from her at the pool, way back when, but he thought his front crawl wasn't too bad after a week of practice, and there was nothing to push you like a competition with another boy with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. When they got back to the shallows, Lily stretched out on her back with her hands splayed out, holding onto Severus' shoulder with just the tip of her fingers so as not to drift off. She looked peaceful, for the first time in ten days.

Severus cleared his throat. "How are you feeling regarding everything back home?"

"Better," she confirmed pensively. "Thanks for indulging me last night. I know it wasn't very pleasant for you."

Severus swallowed and clenched and unclenched his fists in the water. "Did you have fun?"

Lily smiled. "Yeah, a lot. Mind, I'd not want to ever get that trolleyed again, but it felt really good to let loose." She stood up in the water and swam towards him until she could hug him, making him swallow compulsively again and return the gesture. There was more of her skin touching his than he'd experienced since they were nine years old, and it was so intoxicating he barely stopped himself from simply burying his face in her hair and kissing her skin wherever he could reach. He was too terrified to do any such thing, because this, where they were now, was more important than his adolescent urges and fantasies, so instead he focused on what she was saying: "I... I know we're not totally okay yet, but I trust you, Severus. It felt really, really good to do all those silly things last night and trust you to have my back."

"I'll always protect you," slipped out of his mouth, and he clamped his lips firmly shut, feeling his face heat up at the unintended confession. Lily pulled back and swiped her hands over her eyes, before wincing in pain from the salt water that she'd no doubt gotten into them. Severus' heart clenched.

"Come on, let's go back to our towels, I'm feeling pruney."

He let her dissipate the moment and followed her out just as soon as he was sure she wouldn't notice how tight his swimming trunks had gotten, heavily dropping onto his own towel when he reached it. Lily tossed him the sunscreen lotion he'd brewed for them and Severus slathered some onto his chest. He'd still not really grown any chest hair, and with how pasty his skin naturally was, he knew he looked ridiculous; putting sunscreen made him itch to put on the tee again, but he forced himself not to, because Lily's smile had been worth the discomfort he was feeling.

"Here, give me that," she instructed brusquely, walking over her own towel and onto his to drop into a seated lotus position at his back. Frozen in anxious anticipation, Severus could barely force himself to hand over the lotion over his shoulder. "I will never be able to figure out how it is that you've got black hair and are still so pale, I swear," she murmured, tugging the lotion out of his suddenly nerveless fingers.

Her hands were a little chilly from the water, and the touch seared in shockingly good ways. Severus sat ramrod straight while she ran her hands over his back in brusque, assured movements that had not a hint of seduction to them, yet felt like sin, just because they were Lily's. Severus closed his eyes and bit back a rather undignified whimper, and of course the touch had made him utterly forget, but there were marks on his skin that he'd not wanted her to see, and the reminder felt like a bucket of ice water when she began deliberately trailing her finger over the scar on his shoulder, from breaking the picture frame and having a shard embed in it because Tobias had gotten pissed off about the owl that had delivered Severus' acceptance letter five years ago.

Severus jerked away so suddenly that Lily toppled back in surprise, and her face looked stricken when he met her eyes. His stomach felt like lead.

"Oh, God, I'm so sorry, Sev, I didn't– that's not what I– I don't know what I was thinking, I didn't mean–"

She scrambled off his towel and back to her own, while Severus hunched and turned protectively towards her, so that his back was out of her sight. He groped for the tee and scrambled to pull it over his head, feeling utterly exposed and vulnerable. When he met Lily's eyes, he knew something small and hopeful had withered in his chest, something that had been between them. There was guilt and regret and distress on her face, and he knew she was on the verge of crying.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, and Severus nodded stiffly, trying to put away the hurt and betrayal she'd caused, knowing that she'd not intended it.

Lupin cleared his throat, and they both whipped their heads in his direction.

"So, any plans you two have for Diagon Alley in August?"

It was blatant and clumsy, but it was kind in a way that grated, that battered. Severus stomached the resentment and shrugged.

"I figured the weekend before last?" Lily said. "September 1st is on Wednesday, I think. My dad usually drives me and Sev down to London, but I suppose we might take the Floo network, or maybe the Knight Bus this year?"

"We aren't going together, Lily," Severus reminded her. There was a vindictive part of him that exalted in seeing her as bruised as he felt just now because of her careless curiosity, but he was telling her the truth that she needed to remember, too.

"Oh." There was a whole truckload of disappointment in that sound. "I'd forgotten."

"You're not?" Lupin asked in surprise.

"No, uh... our timing doesn't work," Lily said, clearly caught off guard while still trying to process it herself. "What with his, er, thing and all."

"Uh-huh. Aren't you coming back around that weekend? I'd have thought you'd jump at the chance, enlighten the rest of the school that you guys are friends again."

Lily flinched, and Severus felt his insides twist, because Lupin sat up properly and leaned his elbows on his knees to get a better look at Lily's face.

"Well?"

"No," she admitted quietly, "we're not going to be friendly in public for the foreseeable future."

"You're going to hide," the wolf said with a dawning comprehension that suddenly had Severus realizing in utter, white-hot rage at himself just how utterly _stupid_ he'd been, to let Lily convince him of being anywhere near her these two weeks, to let her lull him into comfort and make him forget to come up with some explanation plausible enough to appease the other boy, instead of letting Lupin see through the façade they'll be putting up come September. Merlin, but he was fucking up this spying business every goddamn turn, wasn't he, with Michael and Lily and now Remus _fucking_ Lupin of all people getting wind of it.

His feelings for Lily were the catalyst for everything, but he'd never considered just how big a liability they were, too, and this was potentially life-and-death.

He was panicking, and he knew it was written all over his face, because he was too raw from Lily's actions two minutes before to hide it. He'd never tried Obliviation on anyone before, but he'd studied it, and he thought he could do it. That'd probably be safest; Lily would understand (he hoped desperately), though Lupin no doubt wouldn't.

"Remus, this summer stays between us," Lily's firm voice broke through. "Whatever happens when we go back to Hogwarts, you _cannot_ tell anyone about this summer. Promise me."

"And if I don't?"

"Then..." Lily stalled and clenched her hands in her lap, clenched her jaw tightly for a moment as she read the intent in Severus' eyes, and he found fear in hers. "Then you'll force Severus to do something drastic, and I'll lose you as my friend because you'll never forgive me for knowing he'd do it and standing by, and I'll never forgive myself for being an idiot and orchestrating this whole mess. And... and I'll never forgive _you_ for making me misplace my trust in you."

Lupin eyed both of them carefully, eyed where they'd placed their wands, locked eyes with Severus, then with Lily and licked his lips carefully.

"I can... be an ally."

"I don't trust you," Severus spat out, the tension thick and oily.

"Do you... do you trust what I told you last Friday?"

 _Lily is my friend. Perhaps she's my only friend, and I treasure her for it. I won't let you sully her._

 _She forgave you, and I trust her judgment. So why can't you trust her judgment about my friendship with her?_

 _She's my best friend. I'm not letting her go, no matter what you throw at me. I've never fought for anything in my life, but I'll fight for this._

"I promise that I will not breathe a _word_ about this to a soul, live or dead," Lupin vowed, "so long as I know that whatever it is that's going on is happening with Lily's full knowledge and cooperation. I _will_ protect her."

"It is," Lily said. "It's different than before what happened in June, our friendship. Better. And I trust Severus, so this is important, Remus. It's _very_ important."

"Why?"

Lily opened her mouth, but Severus cut her off before she'd uttered a single syllable with a sharp shake of his head.

"No; no information whatsoever. The more he knows, the bigger a liability he is."

"I promised I'd not say, and I'd be much more comfortable with my decision if I knew what it was that I was actually keeping as a secret," Lupin snapped back irritably.

"No, Severus is right," Lily jumped in. "We're not asking you to get involved, and you've got no responsibility in this, so it's better if all you know is that there is more to whatever happens in September."

"So can I at least know what _is_ going to happen in September?"

Lily and Severus exchanged glances; they'd not really talked about this between themselves yet, either, but Severus was certain that Lily had understood his position in Slytherin House well enough to know.

"We'll stay lab partners in Potions," Severus explained, for Lily as much as Lupin. "We could probably manage to manipulate Flitwick into having us partnered in Charms, too, but not more than that or it'd be suspicious. And it's got to be distant and cold, and surface-polite only."

The cogs were turning in Lupin's mind so very obviously, and Severus dreaded to know what it was that he was coming up with. Was he bright enough to figure out Severus' ultimate endgame, to suspect that he was working for Dumbledore? Probably not, that was perhaps too big a leap for him, if Lily herself had not suspected a thing even when Severus had indirectly told her himself. Did he think they were doing something covert on their own, that he and Lily were playing spies on their own? That would have been suicide, and utter foolishness to boot, but it'd probably ring those Gryffindor bells in Lupin's psyche. Did he think they were staying to their side of their divide and sweeping the politics out of the way of their friendship, as a last-ditch chance to preserve it? Did he think it was to protect Lily, or to make things easier on Severus with his Junior Death Eater pals?

He didn't know, and he doubted Lupin knew, either, because they'd not given him enough information to reach an informed decision, and that was for the best. They were stupid to have thought Lupin would just let it slide, and they'd been so stupid because despite that last week of last year, they were both so caught up in this summer that they'd not even sat down to think about what was going to come after. Merlin, they were fucking idiots, the both of them, and Severus especially, because this was his job, his responsibility, and he should have been thinking about that instead of how desperate he was to change into someone whom Lily could love, desperate to do whatever it took to keep her from rejecting him again.

"But not all the time."

Severus swallowed. "No, not all the time." He had an inkling of how hard this was going to be; doing it without finding ways in which they could speak openly to each other hurt to even think momentarily about, hurt so much Severus didn't think he'd be able to do it.

"You'll need subterfuge. I can... I can help with that."

"You would?" Lily asked, almost gasped out in surprise. Lupin nodded firmly, spine straight.

"Look, Lils, I... I have to apologise to you; I used to think that... well, I didn't understand how you two could be friends, I thought – we all did, you know – that Snape was taking advantage of you and you were too blinded to see it. I was wrong, and I get it better now. Snape's..." The werewolf boy met Severus' gaze with hidden steel that the Slytherin hadn't believed the other possessed until this summer. "You are a good friend to her, and I understand and respect that. So I'll do my part to help out as long as I am still convinced that your actions aren't causing Lily any detriment."

"Any unnecessary detriment."

"What?"

Lily lifted her eyebrow in challenge. "Any _unnecessary_ detriment. Remus, we're not living in a very nice world, and it's only getting worse in the future. We'll all need to make sacrifices, and Severus' actions are already to my detriment, because it hurts to not be able to have our friendship be out in the open. Hurting is something I think we all need to resign ourselves to, and maybe I'm finding this easier to say because I've hurt more in the last six months than I have in my entire life, but I'm also finding that there are ways of fighting through it, and if it's worth it, I am now sure I can handle much more than I ever thought I could. So – any unnecessary detriment."

Displeased, Lupin nonetheless nodded his assent.

"Then... I suppose, if you wanted, you and I could go to Diagon Alley instead?"

It was a blatant topic change, because it was either that or sit in awkward, tense silence for a lot longer than they already had. Severus felt jealousy surge at the thought of the two of them doing something that had, until now, been his and Lily's activity. In that one moment, he was furious with Dumbledore for putting him in this position, for forcing him to drive his connection to Lily underground, where no one could know. Then he remembered that, without Dumbledore, he wouldn't have gotten a chance to do much of anything at all with Lily anyway, and all that was left was envy and despair.

* * *

 **A/N:** So, show of hands, how many want to actually read about the Night of the Drunken Shenanigans? I haven't actually written it yet, but I could for sure do it in a week. However, I'm wavering as to whether it'd be a one-shot people might want to read or not.


	29. Ch II,25: To Learn as Individuals

**Chapter 25: To Learn as Individuals**

On Sunday, the 1st of August, Lily, Remus and Severus walked together to Robin Hood's Bay, the little fishing town where they'd first arrived at, from which they all took a bus to Scarborough, the nearest town with a public Floo access. Remus was the only one who'd be taking it; Archimedes had delivered Severus' Portkey to Hogwarts late last night, and since it was phrase-activated rather than time-sensitive, they could take a bit of time to dally in town. Not too much – they wanted to comfortably avoid the arrival of Lily's girlfriends, with whom she'd agreed to meet around three in the afternoon, since Mary was going to be arriving by train, and none but Clotilde knew that Lily had been here with the boys instead of Petunia.

They had lunch in a bright, naval-themed magical pub; the conversation was quiet and a bit stilted, because none of them were sure of how things would stand when they all met up again, and neither Severus nor Remus still trusted each other enough to be all right with what had transpired on the beach the previous day. Remus left first, giving Lily a warm hug and extending his hand to Severus, which surprised both of them, but resulted in an actual handshake that felt unconstrained by suspicion and dislike and hatred. It was the most amazing result Lily could have asked for when she'd begged both boys to try finding a way of getting along, and she spent the rest of the afternoon in higher spirits because of it.

Afterwards, Lily and Severus spent a bit more time by the water, sitting on the edge of a pier with their feet hanging, and it felt upsettingly similar to the day they'd made their peace in June, after the incident during the O.W.L.s. Lily didn't like the parallels, but she couldn't deny that they were there, especially because ever since yesterday, she'd not managed to stop thinking about the fact that things were going to be completely different when they went back to Hogwarts.

"We'll need to work out a system," Severus told her seriously. "I'll speak with Dumbledore about it, but we'll need to be very careful. I expect Wilkes to be pulling me deeper into his circle this year, and he cannot suspect we're anything but very reluctant lab partners."

"It'll be hard, won't it?"

"Yes. We don't have another choice."

"Would you've told me this if we hadn't fought? If we'd managed to go through June without all that, would you've told me, or would you've just pulled away?"

Severus swallowed, and his Adam's apple bobbed. Lily liked that it wasn't very pronounced, the way Remus' was.

"I would have wanted to tell you," he declared in the end. "But I don't know if Dumbledore would have agreed to it. I suspect he would have, though."

"But if he would not have?"

"I'm in this until the end, Lily. I've chosen my side, and I won't change my mind. I would have done what it took to make sure you were safe."

Lily's throat constricted, and her eyes burned.

"Then we would have been heading for that point all along anyway," she determined achingly. "Without me knowing, we wouldn't have stayed friends irrespective of whether you were doing this or not."

"We were foolish to think that politics wouldn't have come between us," Severus agreed quietly, and it sounded like the words were painful to him. "I used to think that if only we didn't talk about it, it wouldn't matter. I was a fool."

"Yeah, you were."

She hadn't told him about her involvement with the secret club she was a part of; now she wasn't sure if she wanted to do it, either, even though this was perhaps the perfect time.

"You come up with a plan; we'll practice it a bit when you get back from Hogwarts," she said instead.

She gave Severus just as strong a hug as she'd given Remus, and watched him as he twisted out of existence before her. The look in his eyes stayed with her longer; it had seared a bit, made her uncomfortable, like every time he revealed his true feelings for her these days. That was something else she knew they needed to discuss, but she felt reluctant about that, too. She'd been sending him mixed signals the last couple of days, perhaps, now that she thought back on their drunken shenanigans through the lens of this topic. She really shouldn't have done that, because she felt that she had no right to raise his hopes by flirting unless she was willing to follow through, and right now, she felt so emotionally wrung out that she couldn't even consider _a_ romantic relationship, let alone whether Severus was someone she could ever see in that way. It wasn't the only reason, of course; she was afraid of thinking in that direction, because right now, Severus was safe and familiar, and if she even tried to think differently, she'd only end up introducing a change to their dynamic that would make things too volatile for what was looming on the horizon come September. She liked him as her friend, and she clung to that constant even though on some level she knew it was unfair. It, too, was unfair that she knew Severus would forgive her for it, because he deserved better from her. The thing was, this, right now, was the best she _could_ do at the moment; it was all she had to give.

Bettina arrived first, around two-fifty. Her father Apparated her in and offered to bring her stuff to the cottage while the two girls waited for the rest of their group. They picked up Mary at the train station at three-oh-four, a short walk from the narrow magical street that served the Scarborough residents and tourists. Clotilde arrived on her own, having passed her Apparition exam with flying colours a few months before. Her hair was so platinum it was practically grey-white, and she joked that at least this way she wouldn't have to contend with sun-bleaching the way that Lily was now suffering.

Alice arrived last, and Lily, ridiculously enough, found herself crying as she hugged her best friend. She looked different somehow, the way she held herself, straighter and firmer than the year before, the alertness in her eyes that felt wrong. But she also looked happier than Lily had ever seen her, radiating with it from the inside. They hadn't seen each other in more than a year, since the previous June when they'd all gone their separate ways – Lily, Clotilde, Mary and Bettina back to Hogwarts, and Alice to Auror Training.

It felt strange to have the four girls in the cottage with her instead of the two boys. Clotilde took one of the big bedrooms downstairs, while Mary, Alice and Bettina moved into the upper ones, with Lily staying where she'd been for the past week. They went for an afternoon swim, the girls admiring Lily's tan – for the first time in her life, she'd actually managed to avoid getting sunburns – though Clotilde made gentle fun of Lily's now significantly more ginger hair. They ate dinner in the back garden of the cottage, and after they'd cleaned up, Clotilde sat everyone down and asked Lily to tell them everything that had happened with her parents.

Lily's first night with her friends was not an easy one, and she found herself staring at the waxing moon in the middle of the night, wishing that she could hear Severus sitting on the other side of her door, rustling the pages of his book and making shuffling noises against the wood.

Instead, she buried her face in the pillow and fought to fall asleep until nearly dawn.

* * *

"What are your plans for the future?" James asked Athenora as he lounged on his rumpled sheets wearing nothing but a healthy sheen of sweat. She was sitting on the windowsill, dressed in an almost see-through silken robe with a large image of a Chinese dragon of Muggle mythology on it that covered just enough no one would see what she didn't want them to, but allowed James to feast on the view of her lovely breasts and toned stomach, her golden curls and her tanned legs. She was smoking a cigarette of her own making that had a strange smell to it James hadn't run into before and wasn't sure he liked very much.

Exhaling a stream of pale smoke, she turned her head lightly towards him.

"I'll take over my father's company eventually; until then, I'll mostly travel and finish my warding mastery. See the world, gain experiences."

"Any plans on settling down?"

She smiled. "Not any time soon. You Brits can keep your silly notions of marrying early."

"I see nothing wrong with it," James answered with a shrug. "If you find the right person, why wait?"

"Because with our lifespan and our fertility levels, we have no need for women to get married before they're comfortably in their thirties, and men even less so, and I'd never sacrifice my twenties to snot-nosed brats running underfoot, fighting to earn five times more than I'd normally have to, and dealing with a spouse I will have probably fallen out of love with by the time of our fourth anniversary. Twenties are our time, to make something of ourselves and figure out who we are."

"That's a progressive view."

"Don't you know? We belong to a progressive generation," she answered softly, wrapping her lips around the end of the cigarette and inhaling deeply, before pulling her hand away to inspect the lit end and how much of it she'd smoked so far. "I assume you don't agree, then?"

"Well, I'd not marry just anyone, but with the right girl..." He shrugged and left it that.

"Is there a right girl, then?"

"Lily Evans," James said the name with all the reverence it deserved, allowing himself to slide down more horizontally onto the bed to stare up at the ceiling and remember her red hair and the green eyes in that lovely face. "She's the girl I'll marry one day."

"Do tell."

"Fellow Gryffindor, my year, deep red hair down to her elbows, these amazing almond-shaped green eyes, slim and fit and more brilliant than any other girl I've ever run across. She's a goody-two-shoes, until you piss her off, and then she's a firecracker."

"Goody-two-shoes, huh?"

"Fights for the causes she believes in. She's Muggle-born, so she's invested in current politics."

"One of the outsiders?"

"Lily?" James laughed. "No, Lily's a popular girl, queen of the Gryffindor upper years now Alice Ainsworth has left."

"A bitch, then?"

"Merlin, no! Not even close!" Pushing up on his elbows, he stared at Athenora with a frown, wondering if this was some sort of jealousy talking; he thought they both knew what this was between them, but he couldn't deny that there was a little thrill hidden beneath the indignation. He liked the thought that she was getting territorial.

"Queen bees are usually bitches," Athenora answered with a shrug, taking a moment to carefully extinguish the cigarette. "Self-obsessed, shallow, always more interested in being adored than being respected. Often inferiority complexes hiding behind it."

"Lily is _nothing_ like that."

"I suppose high school politics work differently here, then?"

"They must, because Alice was also considered the queen of Gryffindor upper years when she was at Hogwarts, and she's the sweetest, kindest person I've ever met. Actually, she's so sweet your teeth would rot. I don't know a single person who didn't like her, not even the Slytherins, beyond the fact that she was a Gryffindor."

"So you'd be the king of Gryffindor upper years, I assume?"

"Damn right."

"That makes you a biased source of information," Athenora informed him, sliding off the window seat to carefully pack up the remainder of her cigarette. James wasn't sure why she always did that, but it didn't stop him from tracking her movement around the room. "So what's her flaw?"

"Flaw?"

"There's always a flaw."

"Well... there's this childhood friend of hers. Bloke's a complete creep, never washes his hair, has crooked teeth, horrible skin, dresses like that Muggle vampire..."

"Dracula?"

"Yeah, him. He's a sleaze, one of Voldemort's groupies, and Lily has– had a blind spot for him the size of the Continent. She's finally come to her senses about him just before we let out for the hols, though. Had to let him hurt her to do it, apparently."

"What did he do?"

"Called her Mudblood. It's a very offensive slang for Muggle-born."

"Leaving you the perfect opening to offer a shoulder to cry on?"

James couldn't stop himself from wincing, stomach turning as the memory of all those slugs he'd vomited assaulted him.

"I might have facilitated the event, and she wasn't exactly pleased with me."

"I imagine no girl would if a guy pushed her best friend to break his mask and expose his true self to her. What did you do?"

James shrugged. "Used one of his spells to give the whole yard a flash of his pants and accused him of being a damsel in distress. The way he looks at her, I thought it'd take more than that, to be honest. But it's for her own good. Snape is a bad Knut, and the further away from him she is, the better."

"Well, no wonder she was angry with you; I can't imagine she cares for the way you bullied the guy." Athenora sat back on the window seat, leaning her back against the glass and spreading her legs invitingly, and James felt himself responding to the sight, growing stiff between his legs. "Bullying never sits with Goody-two-shoes-es, and if she's the spitfire you call her when she's riled up, then she won't be overlooking it to fall in love with you."

"That guy deserves it. He's put me _and_ my friends in the hospital wing before."

"I'm sure you've put him there, too. I'm not judging you, Jimmy; I've done my share of uncharitable behavior. I'm just telling you that the little flaw isn't going to go away just because that guy isn't in the picture anymore. You don't have her trust, and unless she trusts you, she won't consider you as a romantic prospect, so you might want to work on improving your image with her first."

Sitting up, James set his feet on the carpet and walked over to stand between the V of Athenora's legs.

"That sounds like excellent advice," he informed the girl, bending down to enjoy a slow, filthy kiss. "You are quite brilliant, Athens, if I may say so."

"You may," she answered, licking her lip and biting it as she wrapped her hands around his hips to tug him forward. "We'll have to find some time to spend with our girls, Jimmy; pleasant as it's been, we can't really stay closed in here for the rest of the summer. They might get suspicious as to what we're up to."

James laughed and shook his head.

"You think someone will see us now?"

Athenora grinned wickedly, letting her robe slip to expose her back at the large window and whoever happened to be passing beneath it.

"Do you dare?"

"Oh, you don't know what I wouldn't dare do, darling."

"Well, I'll look forward to discovering it."

* * *

The day after the girls arrived, Lily got her period. She'd been expecting it for the last four days – it was never perfectly regular, and tended to get worse on that front whenever she was under too much stress – but this time, she had mixed feelings on it. She was glad that she'd not gotten it while the boys were here, because that whole drunk skinny-dipping episode would have been _far_ more awkward for everybody if she'd been bleeding down her thighs on top of everything else, but it could have freaking waited one more day, so that at least she'd have had a good night's sleep to bolster her.

As it was, her cramps woke her up from restless, hard-won sleep, forcing her to drag herself to the bathroom to set up the pad and dig around her toiletries for the pain pills. She envied Petunia _so much_ on not having cramps, Merlin. Hers usually laid her out for the day if she didn't take her pills early enough, and in this case, surprisingly enough, non-magical medicine worked overall better than potions, which took away the pain more effectively but also made her feel constipated and queasy, so on the whole, she had decided that she'd rather suffer a little pain than the other stuff.

It still meant that she was extremely sluggish in the morning, spending half of it on the toilet and the rest on the couch, trying to nap. Mary and Bettina were used to this, of course, having shared the sleeping quarters with Lily since they were all eleven years old. Clotilde just made her tea, gave her a charmed heating pad (and wasn't that just the most idiotic thing, to need a heating pad when it was scorching outside, but the inside of the house was kept pleasantly cool, and that didn't sit too well with Lily just now) and cleaned up after their breakfast before leaving with the other girls, but Alice fretted (but then Alice had a bit of a tendency towards that) and in the end decided to stay and keep Lily company for the morning.

So, when the other three had left, Alice got a paperback out of her room, sat down so that she had Lily's legs in her lap, and started running her fingers very soothingly over Lily's calves and ankles while she read. Lily wanted to doze a bit more; even more, however, she wanted to spend time with Alice, and it was an easy decision to make, in spite of the dull pain in her abdomen.

Alice Ainsworth had been fourth year when Lily had first arrived at Hogwarts and part of a bigger group of Gryffindor girls that had been organizing tutoring sessions for the newest arrivals. Alice had acted as a surrogate big sister to Lily's class; she'd taught Lily how to properly write with a quill – Severus had started teaching her, but it had required him stealing his mother's quill and ink bottle, which had not gone over well with Eileen Snape, so they'd been cut off in their attempts after only a few sessions – and had been nice enough to introduce Lily to the loner second-year Clotilde, who'd stood out like a sore thumb and hadn't gotten along particularly well with anyone but Alice and two Romani sisters who were daytime visitor to Hogwarts for a few N.E.W.T.-level courses and were in general considered such absolute oddities that no one else had even tried to befriend them. Given that there were only two other girls in her dormitory with her, Lily had naturally pulled Clotilde into their tiny circle, and when the bigger group had begun dispersing to reform other groups or leave Hogwarts, Alice had stuck with them rather than the other girls in her class, who'd preferred the company of upper years.

Alice was probably the genuinely nicest person that Lily had ever met in her life, unobtrusive, always willing to help, loyal and kind. She'd been sorted into Gryffindor for her leadership skills, and she was very good at it when the need arose, but she didn't express a strong desire to do so for the most part, being more content to let Lily take the lead in their little group. Blond-haired and round-faced, she was a Pure-blood and an only child, her family well respected but falling somewhere in the middle in the social hierarchy of Wizarding Britain, and of all of them, she was perhaps the most conservatively raised. The one thing that Lily truly disliked about Alice, primarily because she felt this wasn't good for Alice herself, was the older girl's tendency to always put other people before her own needs; more than once, the four girls had been witness to the aftermath of such a situation, and it was always Alice who paid the highest price.

"I've been meaning to ask you something," Alice said, looking hopefully and a little shyly at Lily. "You're the first person I've told this."

"Yes?" Lily encouraged, perking up a bit. Alice's cheeks pinked and the most radiant smile Lily had ever seen spread on her face.

"Frank has asked me to marry him. We're getting married."

Lily had to shriek in excitement, bending up to hug Alice and not even caring when it caused a cramp bad enough that she had to groan a bit through it. Not even her stupid period could cloud over the happiness she felt for her friend.

"Congratulations! Oh, I'm so happy for you, Alice! When, tell me, tell me, when did he propose and how did he propose and where's your ring, I haven't seen it, why aren't you wearing it– ugh," she ended her stream of babble on a grunt, falling back into supine position and pressing the heating pad onto her stomach. "I hate my stupid uterus sometimes."

"It might get better after you have a child," Alice offered compassionately. "It did for my mother after she had me."

"So, not for another decade at least," Lily concluded a bit miserably, but resettled more comfortably on the cushions. "Here's to hoping."

Alice smiled and shook her head in answer. "The ring is upstairs, in my room; I don't want to wear it to the beach, the saltwater wouldn't be good for it, and I'd be afraid it'd slip off and I'd lose it. But, I'll show it to you all at lunch. And he proposed on Friday, after I got my test results. Oh, I've not told you this either – I've managed to get on the fast track, I'll be done in a year instead of two if I can keep my scores up."

"You're so amazing, Alice," Lily told her honestly, and her cheeks were starting to hurt from smiling so widely.

"Speaking of tests, you haven't even told me about your O.W.L.s."

"Oh, no, no. You first. Tell me all about how he proposed. What did he say? Did he make a romantic speech?"

They spent the next half hour on the topic, and Lily honestly couldn't remember when she'd enjoyed listening to someone talk more in the recent past. Alice _glowed_ , and it truly suited her. Lily liked Frank, too, and thought him good for her friend; she hadn't really known him during their time at Hogwarts together, given that he'd been a seventh-year when she'd been a firstie, but she'd gotten to know him better in the intervening years. He and Alice had been good friends for quite a while before they'd gotten together, after her disastrous relationship with a guy called Sebastian Pierce who'd been a year ahead of her in school and a prime example of someone who'd figured out he could use Alice's natural tendency to put others first to his own selfish benefit. Bettina had been their source of information about Frank's years-long romantic interest in Alice, and the four of them had managed to play match-maker to everyone's satisfaction. Unlike Sebastian, Frank was very considerate of Alice's needs, and though he was a bit like Potter in that he was also something of a spoiled only son and a troublemaker, Frank was a magnitudes better person in Lily's opinion, because Frank always stood up for the little guy, even when that little guy was a Slytherin firstie being bullied for claiming a red-haired Gryffindor girl as his friend. He'd very deservedly held the position of Head Boy, and had won over eleven-year-old Lily's girlish heart by twisting Potter's and Black's ears until they'd been red and throbbing any time he caught them trying to torment Severus. The memory of it still made her smirk to this day.

And the question Alice wanted to ask Lily?

"Alice, _of course_ , yes. Yes, I will be honoured to be your maid of honour."

"We're still considering the dates, but I don't think I could have the stress of organising it while I'm on the fast track in my Auror Training, so perhaps a summer wedding next year. I am truly hoping for a small affair, but I'm a bit afraid that Madam Augusta would reject it outright, because Frank is her only son. He agrees with me on this," she hurried to add, "and I know he will speak with her about it, but I can't begrudge her the wish."

"Of course you can," Lily said with a roll of her eyes. "It's _your_ wedding, not hers. I imagine your parents are thrilled?"

"Yes, though I have to admit I'm dreading Mother and Madam Augusta planning it all out together."

"You just focus on your Auror Training, and we can deal with the rest; aside from Clo, we're pretty free and clear next year, so you can just send all that stuff to us and we'll veto it in your name."

"Oh, I couldn't possibly ask you to do that, Lily."

"Of course you can; that's what bridesmaids do."

"If you're sure," Alice said dubiously, and Lily nodded her head once firmly to close out that discussion. "Now, tell me about your O.W.L.s."

Right, that.

Their O.W.L. results had arrived a few days before Remus had come to Cokeworth, and to say that her mother had been surprised by some of her scores had been an understatement. Her father had thought nothing strange of them, just asked her if she could still pursue her chosen career path with them, and Lily had fudged the truth a little, but on the whole, he'd been very positive about them. Now, in light of the family rift, Lily fleetingly wondered at the differences in their opinions, and what that told about how they saw her.

"Well, I passed all of them; I got 'E's in History of Magic and DADA, and I got 'A's in Astronomy and Transfiguration, and the rest are 'O's. Flitwick already wrote to me to tell me that I got the highest points in Charms in thirty years, and that I was only a little bit behind him, if you can believe it. He's already offered to take me on as a journeyman for my Charms Mastery when I finish Hogwarts, if I wanted to continue on."

"Lily, that's amazing!"

"It really is. I was blown away by that letter. Though it'll be a bit problematic when I don't get into N.E.W.T. level Transfiguration," she concluded miserably, pressing the hot water bottle more firmly against her lower stomach as a bit stronger cramp made her wince. God, did she hate the ones that felt like stuff was literally tearing off inside her. "I need Transfiguration for my mastery, and McGonagall doesn't take 'Acceptables'."

"Was that the day when the... incident... by the Lake happened?"

Yeah, it was; goddamnit, she had known she'd screwed it up, but she'd still held out hope that she'd manage to wiggle through with an 'Exceeds Expectations'.

"How are you holding up with all of that?" Alice asked gently. "Mary wrote to me about it. I'm so sorry about your friendship with Severus."

Lily's throat dried up, and she swallowed with difficulty. She couldn't tell Alice anything about it, it wasn't safe. She and Severus had agreed just yesterday that no one else could know they'd patched things up, that they couldn't let what happened with Remus happen again. And because she'd known that she wasn't a very good liar, Lily and Severus had actually spent a few minutes practicing it yesterday, and so when now she told Alice the lie, it slipped off the tongue easily enough, even though her throat felt too tight to properly speak.

"He's chosen his way, and I've chosen mine."

Severus had insisted that she say that, though it had stung them both, had hung between them on that pier. _Always skirt as close to the truth as possible. All the best lies have a kernel of truth to them, and if you keep to the truth, it will be harder for anyone to trip you up in the inventions_. She'd taken his advice, of course; no one would know about lying and manipulation better than a Slytherin.

"I had hoped that you'd be able to pull him into the Light," Alice said sadly. "I hate to think that some people might be beyond redemption."

"Yeah," Lily agreed, thinking of Cain Mulciber and her poor seventh-year friends. "I miss him, though." Surprised, she found her tear ducts stinging, and she pinched her mouth shut and blinked forcefully a few times to clear her eyes.

"I think that if you write to McGonagall and explain to her why you got such a low grade on the Transfiguration exam, that she'd make an exception for you. After all, she's known you as an excellent student for five years. She'll understand."

"I... I guess. Yeah, I might as well do that; it won't have cost me anything if she refuses, and I might still be allowed in."

The thought of still managing to get in made her feel a swooping hope, because Flitwick's offer was so very tempting – perhaps tempting enough to pull her away from Auror Training. Flitwick was one of the best, if not _the_ best Charms Master in the country, and on top of that, he was a duelling master, too, and learning to properly duel was going to be crucial if she was going to be fighting the Death Eaters after Hogwarts. Auror Training required five or more 'Exceeds Expectations', but they weren't as specific about which those were, and Lily knew that even if she didn't manage to get into the N.E.W.T. level class, Remus would share his notes with her and she'd end up being prepared for the Auror Academy exams anyway. And, of course, there was also the fact that if she were to become an Auror, she'd sooner or later find herself in conflict with Severus' mission for Dumbledore, and that... well, that was something she _really_ didn't want to have to live through.

"What did your parents say about it?"

Lily shrugged. "Dad was supportive, but then he always is. It sometimes feels like I can do no wrong in his eyes, even when I know that I have. Mum was, I don't know, shocked and disappointed. I think she expected me to have all 'Outstandings', but that was never going to happen; I detest Astronomy, I wasn't even really trying on that test, and that was right after Transfiguration, too, I'd not slept eight hours in those two days, and they expected me to be functional at bloody midnight. It did Petunia good to hear her sound less than pleased with me, though, especially when Petunia's results all came in and she got only one B on her A2s, and she took four."

"I'm glad to hear that you've improved your relationship with her."

"For a given value of improved," Lily agreed. "Perhaps when we're both out of the house, we'll be able to build something more on it. Dad apologised for unintentionally enflaming the conflict."

"I hope they manage to sort it out between them."

"Dad said that if I asked him to, he'd try it one more time with Mum."

Alice frowned a bit, her hands stilling on Lily's ankles. "Perhaps you should ask him. Tearing a family apart like that... it must be a terrible thing. He cannot find it so easy to toss away so many years they'd had together. He might be asking you indirectly to give him direction on this; if they could find a completely new way to make the marriage work..."

A part of Lily wanted to clutch to the suggestion, but a much bigger part rebelled. Hearing it from someone else, it sounded too manipulative and unfair.

"I can't shake the feeling that they'd be miserable either way, and, I suppose my ideas about marriage are too idealistic, but I don't think I'd want them to be in just any sort of marriage, Alice. Two strangers living together, bound to each other by social convention and nothing much else."

"Except their love. You told us he said that he loves her still."

"Yes, but also admitted that he loves that other woman, and he said that I'll understand one day that love isn't enough."

"Perhaps, but isn't it one's responsibility to ensure that love _isn't_ the only thing?"

"Yes, but what do you do when it is? Do you try to find anything else to fill the void, or do you cut your losses?"

"Do you invest more, when you've already invested so much, or do you give up and quit?"

Lily didn't know; what she did know was that, with a week of distance and her own experiences over this year so far, getting away and taking the time to process this was the right course of action, because the longer she lived with this reality, the more she understood exactly what sort of responsibility her father had placed on her shoulders with his promise, and the less impulse she felt towards going with her own strongest wish, which was to not lose her family as it had been until now.

It didn't get her any closer to knowing what to do in the end, but at least it made her feel like she was seeing things a bit more clearly, and she counted that as progress, too, which was good enough for her at this moment in time. She still had two weeks to make up her mind, after all.

* * *

"You and Lily have gotten quite close," Remus' mum noted after Remus had quietly explained the various ups and downs of his two-week visit to his best friend's during their lunch together on Monday in the little hole-in-the-wall restaurant near her office. Really, sharing all of this with her had proven to be the best way of decompressing – he'd not even realised how sneakily tense the whole situation had made him until he'd put it into words for her, both Lily's home situation and the uncertainty regarding this thing she'd cooked up with Snape (not that he'd told his mum anything about _that_ ; he'd promised and Remus kept his promises).

"I suppose she's my best friend now that the others have decided not to be," Remus answered with a shrug, picking a bit at his very rare, very spicy steak – with the full moon closing in on him in a few more days, his appetite for uncooked meat had shot up again, and while steak was definitely not the cheapest of meal options, his mother had summarily ordered it for him over his discomfit, calling their outing a proper lunch date and refusing to hear any more of it. The fact that she never seemed to get uncomfortable with his frankly disturbing dietary cravings was one of the things that made Remus adore her.

"She's the only one who's ever phoned you."

A snort escaped him in answer. "Yeah, but that's mostly because she's Muggle-born. Peter could have maybe called, but the other two wouldn't know what a telephone is if it hit them in the face."

"You're always in a better mood after you speak with her."

It was the tentativeness in her voice that made Remus frown at his mother.

"I'm not sure I get what you mean, Ma."

"I was just wondering if perhaps you weren't interested in her in a romantic way."

Remus groaned. "Merlin, this again; you know, her mum wouldn't leave well enough alone either, until the whole mess started. We're just friends."

"I know, but that doesn't mean you might not want to be more than that," Hope answered in such a serious tone that Remus momentarily sobered up from his annoyance. "You've never mentioned any girls you were interested in, and Lord knows I understood, but you do speak of Lily differently than the rest of your friends."

"Former friends."

"Yes."

Remus took a bite of his meat with some potatoes and stuffed them in his mouth, choosing to waste a bit of time by chewing very slowly and quite deliberately. His mother really wasn't the type to give up; it was a stalling tactic only and on the whole a pretty ineffective one, he was well aware of that.

Did he like Lily in that way? He'd really not considered it, despite all of the little needling her mother had done for that first week, and his own mother's throw-away comments, either. To someone who valued friendships so dearly, gender of his friends was secondary. Remus certainly wasn't interested in other boys, at least not more than perhaps noticing whether or not a particular boy might be striking (for instance, he quite understood why girls seemed to go for Sirius in spite of his insensitivity), but then he was pretty sure that was about the same as the root jealousies that girls felt towards other beautiful girls. He _had_ been attracted to a few girls, but that also went mostly unnoticed, because no girl had ever been interested back that he could remember, and he'd had too many bad experiences with James and Sirius setting him up on blind dates to take something like that for granted.

So he'd simply disregarded the comments that implied things between him and Lily were more than they were, and left it at that. But this, this was different. This was his mother asking him a very serious, direct question, and what went through Remus' mind was that night at the seaside they'd gotten drunk, and how he hadn't really had any coalesced thoughts on the matter of seeing either Lily or Snape naked, but how he'd still felt the wolf growling inside, awoken by the liquor and wanting to assert dominance.

Maybe that was more than he'd thought it was; maybe that was more about Lily than about his dislike and distrust of Snape. He'd felt calm and upbeat the next day, for the most part, at least until those two had dropped that bomb of a secret on him, and he'd never thought to analyse it. The wolf had its own triggers, and Remus had learned to control it; that had always been enough for him – understanding them was beyond his interests.

Now – now he sat there, with his mother at the table across from him, and actually thought about it, about how the thing he looked forward to the most were his phone calls with Lily, and how in spite of all the family drama and the overall stress he'd brought home because of it, the two weeks he'd spent in Cokeworth and on the seaside were the best time he'd had in probably years, and how he envied Snape on that history he shared with Lily, because the other boy was painfully obvious about his adoration of the girl and history trumped everything, and Remus thought that maybe he did like Lily like that after all.

"I don't know," he finally gave his mother the answer she wanted. "I didn't really think about it before now."

"Maybe you should. She sounds like a very polite, lovely girl, and I haven't seen you look this good in... in years, I suppose," (Remus' heart twitched painfully at the hidden grief in his mother's voice) "and I'm saying this very selfishly, _cariad_ , but anything and anyone that makes you shine like this is someone I want you to hold onto tightly and not let go."

And Remus blushed, because he and his mother were more honest with each other than most children were with their parents, but this was a whole other kind of honesty, one that, he now understood, having been presented with it, was the honesty afforded by an adult to a young adult, not a child. His mother was telling him this, and she was acknowledging that he was growing up, that he was no longer her little werewolf boy who needed to be protected and nurtured in direct spite of the world that wanted to bring him down.

His heart ached with how much he loved her.

"I'll think about it," he promised quietly. "It's not so simple, Ma; for one thing, James has been chasing after her for years now."

"You don't owe those boys _anything_ ," Hope said firmly. "You _especially_ do not owe them your heart. From what you've told me, Lily is not in the least interested in him, and with good reason."

"It's not just him, though. Lily's friend, the one I got to know a bit better while I was in Cokeworth, I'm pretty sure he's been in love with her since they day they met."

"That's a very long time, Remmy, and love isn't the same as chivalry. If he hasn't approached her with it yet, then that is not your concern. The only thing that should be your concern is how Lily feels about the other boys, and how she might feel about you, if you asked her."

"It's not a good time for her, Ma. This thing with her parents, and I think there's more, too, that she's not told me. She's got enough on her plate as it is without me even considering anything of this kind."

"You should consider it for yourself, _cariad_ , not for her. And she won't always have this much on her plate. You said the situation with her family is calming now for her. Perhaps in a few months, you'll be presented with some sort of opportunity, and you should know whether your interest in her is romantic or not when it comes."

So Remus nodded and accepted his mother's advice, and they instead talked about his O.W.L. results and what he'd want to do after Hogwarts, and what his plans were with Lily about the Diagon Alley shopping this year.

* * *

Hogwarts felt cavernous every time Severus wandered its deserted corridors, the stone walls cold to the touch in such sharp contrast to the windowpanes heated by the relentless sun, even this far north. He'd spent Christmases here before, had thought he'd known what it felt like to have the great magical castle mostly to himself; he'd been wrong. Now, with only a few of the faculty and none of the students in attendance, the castle felt profoundly lonely, and profoundly comforting.

In so many ways, Hogwarts was Severus' real home. For all the pain he'd endured here, at the hands of callous, bullying Gryffindors, at the hands of cold, manipulative Slytherins, at the hands of Lily's flighty thoughts and attentions, even at the hands of Dumbledore's masterful handling of him, the one that had made him feel like a puppet on the old man's strings just a couple of months ago, Hogwarts had been solace from his parents, uncaring and hateful in turn, and his soul rang out with that knowledge here, when he had the great castle almost fully to himself.

Ten days had passed since the afternoon he'd arrived from the Yorkshire shore by Portkey, and in those ten days, he'd barely been away from Dumbledore's office and quarters, almost constantly immersed in Occlumency training. With the tempo he and Dumbledore had set, he knew his grasp on the Mind Art would be almost complete by the time he was to return. Occlumency came so naturally to him that he was left almost breathless when he thought about it, because not even with the Dark Arts and potioneering had he experienced something so difficult feeling so easy and right. There would be a lot of work still in the coming years, of course, in branching through the more obscure aspects of Occlumency, those that overlapped with and bled into other Mind Arts such as Legilimency or Mutamency, skills that he was sure to need once his orbit of the Dark Lord's circle became tighter, once he reached the point of meeting the Dark wizard himself. But for now, when at most he had to trick teens his own age, he was more than confident that these three weeks would be enough practice.

Dumbledore was extraordinarily busy throughout the day – with less than three weeks left before the beginning of term, he was almost constantly at his desk, dealing with paperwork, writing correspondences, sorting legalities. Severus spent most of his time sitting in a garishly patterned high-back chair in a corner of the old wizard's office, surrounded by books and tools that Dumbledore had provided him with for independent practice. McGonagall had arrived a couple of days after Severus, and always seemed discomforted by Severus' presence in the Headmaster's office whenever she had school business there. Dumbledore seemed to find that amusing, though he indulged her by concealing their conversation with Severus' own _Muffliato_ , as if there was something that would have interested the sixteen-year-old about running the school. Severus had no idea what justification Dumbledore had given the shrewd witch, if any, but he trusted the old wizard to ensure McGonagall would pose no threat to their arrangement or Severus' spying duties. He'd always disliked the woman, her zeal for all things Gryffindor having burned him more than once, especially in how easily she overlooked what Potter and his ilk did to Severus on a regular basis, but he knew she was loyal beyond compare to Dumbledore. Gryffindors did tend to act like infatuated Hufflepuffs within their own group, and if Severus benefited in this case, well then, so much the better.

Only one time did Severus dare involve himself with the adults' business, about a week after his arrival at Hogwarts. Lily was involved, though indirectly – it seemed a pattern for him, one he knew wasn't going to lead him anywhere good, but he couldn't seem to help himself. McGonagall walked into Dumbledore's office carrying an opened letter, and the familiar looping handwriting caught Severus' attention enough that he tensed minutely, though neither adult seemed as if they noticed. It was a risky move, really, rather too risky, but it was about Lily, and he _had_ to know. So, when Dumbledore put up his noise-inducing spell, Severus took a quick moment to focus himself before breathing out the counter-spell, hands clutching his book tightly.

"–ans' letter," McGonagall was saying as she handed Dumbledore the parchment for perusal. Severus breathed an inaudible sigh of relief, even as his heartbeat kicked up a notch. He'd managed to pull it off wandlessly; only the third time since inventing it. "I was more than a little surprised when I went through the O.W.L. results list and found that she'd gotten an 'Acceptable'. On the high end, but not enough for 'Exceeds Expectations'."

"And she's now asking if you would still take her into your N.E.W.T. class," Dumbledore surmised. "I assume you've not come to a definitive conclusion yet, if you're asking me for my opinion?"

"Yes. Ordinarily I wouldn't even consider it, but she's had Os on all her final exams since her arrival here, and her work in class is more or less exemplary throughout. Frankly, I was astonished at her grade."

Severus had to close his eyes and put all that Occlumency practice to strenuous use in order to hide his reaction to their conversation – the guilt at causing Lily to stumble so badly in their exams was one that had been eating him up ever since the beginning of July, when they'd gotten their results. Severus himself only had one A, in History of Magic, because he couldn't have been arsed to study for it, but he'd managed the direct aftermath of that day by the lake better than Lily, who'd ended up with two As and thus worse results overall than he had.

"It is your discretion, of course, Minerva," Dumbledore declared, even as his eyes moved over the written lines until he'd read it properly. "Mr Snape, perhaps you have something to offer the discussion?" he asked, and it made both Severus and McGonagall start in surprise, if for very different reasons. How had he figured it out? Severus hadn't exactly been able to test it very effectively, but Michael had said that he'd been unable to notice when the spell had been taken down, unless he really paid attention.

McGonagall glared at Severus, but the Slytherin himself paid her only nominal mind, battling between humiliation at getting caught, defiance at having done it in the first place, and fear of the consequence, so much so that after the silence ran longer that appropriate, Dumbledore prompted him with: "Perhaps you could illuminate for Professor McGonagall what this 'emotional distress' Miss Evans refers to was?"

Blinking up at the man, Severus eyed him warily, unsure if this was a test of some sort or a prelude for the punishment of going against Dumbledore's rather poignant demand for privacy. In the end, his urge to make things right for Lily overcame his reticence, and he nodded, meeting McGonagall's eyes.

"That was the day after the incident by the lake. I am to blame for it; I was... provoked. I misguidedly lashed out at her," he admitted quietly, and McGonagall's nostrils widened even as her eyes narrowed. "She was upset."

"That commotion was your doing, then?"

Severus let the burst of anger and annoyance deflect backwards off his mental shields, the ones Dumbledore had taught him just yesterday specifically for the purposes of containing sudden emotions that he could not let find their way outwards. The sensation was rather disgusting, given that volatile emotions were healthier let out rather than kept in, but it wasn't anything unfamiliar to him, even if he'd been doing that rather unconsciously in the previous years. Tobias had been the first to teach him that particular skill.

"Lily's upset was my fault," he repeated firmly, keeping his face impassive and not giving McGonagall what she wanted, which was full culpability. The whole thing most _certainly_ hadn't been his fault – it had been the fault of her _precious_ Gryffindors, but he was not in the least bit in the mood to listen to her fawning over them. She'd never believed him before in her life, and he had no illusions about her believing him now, especially when Lily, the injured party here in question, was also one of her Lions. "Even if you don't let her into the class, she'll take the N.E.W.T. exam regardless."

"And how would she accomplish that?"

"No doubt she'd have Lupin tutor her, and if he won't, I will; I owe her that debt."

And that was about that; whether McGonagall was going to decide in Lily's favour or not, Severus wasn't privy to, but he'd done his best to repair the damage he'd caused.

Of course, once the witch was out of the office, there was another thing to contend with.

"You are not privy to a great many things for a reason, Mr Snape," Dumbledore said, turning his chair to face Severus directly. "I will let this instance go, because I firmly believe that everyone should be given more than one chance to prove themselves, and because I understand why you had done it. I will not be so lenient the next time you deliberately attempt to deceive me and breach my trust for personal gain."

"Yes, sir," Severus returned, the uncomfortable mix of emotion bouncing in his chest still, until he took it and shoved it forcefully to the side, decidedly not wishing to analyse why it was that he felt guilt over something practically expected of every decent Slytherin, and certainly one pretending at being a spy.

While Dumbledore did devote as much of his time as he possibly could to Severus' development, either through conversation or through active Legilimency, he simply could not do so 24/7, not with his workload the way it was, and so his solution a few days after his arrival had been to provide the Slytherin with two objects slated to that purpose– a Curio, a magical object that was designed to force compulsion in milder or stronger measure in a set radius around it, and the Sorting Hat, of all things. It made sense, of course, given that Occlumency was primarily a defensive Mind Art and thus it could most effectively be developed through active attack on the mind. The Curio served a continual function in creating pressure on Severus to constantly guard his mind with Occlumency, with the ultimate goal being that keeping his mental shields raised became instinctive, rather than conscious. The Sorting Hat, being an object of independent intellect and perfect Legilimency skills, was that active opponent that Severus needed, and while it outwardly complained to Dumbledore about having to work for a living, it actually seemed to be both highly entertained by the task set for it by the school's headmaster, and gently kind and encouraging about Severus' motivations and struggles.

 _You are very advanced for someone so young, Mr Snape,_ it had whispered in his head when Severus had first put it over his brow. _And certainly far better than you were five years ago._

 _But not good enough,_ Severus had surmised.

 _Not yet, but you are not as far from it as you believe yourself to be. Where is that sense of self-assurance I remember from your sorting, young man? Ah, I see,_ very _well done, though unfortunately, not quite well enough. Emotions are far harder to hide than memories and thoughts, you see, and all I needed to do was follow their path. I can teach you how to camouflage that; it will no doubt be easier. There are so many emotions that are very much alike, and it would certainly benefit you far more if you knew how to make others see them falsely, than for them to discover their absence._

The Sorting Hat was not a real teacher; Dumbledore did the actual explanations and demonstrations. But it was unerring in pointing out which aspects of Severus' skill were lagging, forcing him to focus on them until it began praising Severus on effectively concealing his thoughts, emotions and memories from its knowing inner gaze. Not quickly enough for it not to come to know Severus inside out in three weeks, of course, but there was surprising comfort in trusting the magical artefact rather than the flesh and bone wizard with some of Severus' deepest secrets.

 _I cannot reveal anything I have learned of you to anyone,_ the Hat had told him. _Nor do I wish to break your confidence in any case. But I am very glad to see that you have come to know yourself so much better than when we first met. You do your House proud, and Her as well._

 _Her?_ Severus had asked, and though he'd been sure that he'd kept Lily's face out of the Hat's purview, the artefact had nonetheless chuckled knowingly.

 _Yes, your Miss Evans as well, but in this case I was referring to Hogwarts. Your mind is quite orderly, and your magical core is almost at the adult level; you would likely be able to sense Her, if you were taught how._

In the end, he learned what the Hat had meant by that from Flitwick of all people. Though other professors were slated to arrive right after Severus' departure, three other members of faculty were in attendance in those three weeks – Hagrid, of course, who never left Hogwarts grounds for more than day trips (though Severus had no contact with him throughout); Madam Pomfrey, who found Severus wandering the castle in the pre-dawn hours after a bad night and roped him into helping her brew simple curative potions to replenish her stock, something that Severus ended up doing most evenings as a way to decompress from the Occlumency practice; and Filius Flitwick, who'd always been far more judicious towards Severus than even Slughorn, and was thus one of the teachers the sixteen-year-old Slytherin actively liked, though they'd rarely interacted in any but the usual perfunctory manner of a professor and a student.

The diminutive professor roped Severus into sharing breakfast very early in the morning one day after catching him wandering the castle in search of effective hideaways and secret passageways, empty classrooms and unused corridors, those places that were going to allow him to both keep his friendship with Lily and do his job for Dumbledore effectively. They ate toast with jam and honey, drank coffee together, and somehow ended up speaking at length about Hogwarts the near-sentient castle so that the diminutive professor even offered to teach Severus how to communicate with her (because apparently artificial constructs of sentience were assigned a female gender through some arbitrary rule no one knew the origins of).

Severus came out of that conversation considering whether it was worth it to pursue some sort of working connection with the charms master, especially if Lily did take him up on his offer of apprenticeship, which Severus was nearly desperate for her to do, as it would mean she wouldn't pursue Auror Training. One fact was to the benefit of such a connection – Flitwick was more or less considered neutral on the topic of the Dark Lord, and Severus requesting an extracurricular project from him wasn't going to be seen as strange in the least. Additionally, the diminutive professor loved Lily; perhaps for her, he'd keep a small secret and allow Severus to use some of those meetings for his debriefings with Dumbledore instead. It was worth mentioning to the Headmaster, if nothing else.

And perhaps it was nice to have more than one member of the Hogwarts faculty looking at him in a positive manner. He thought it was rather likely that Madam Pomfrey was going to let him perform some experiments in her laboratory if Slughorn still persisted in refusing Severus' request for his own private one, even though Dumbledore had informed him that he'd had the highest scores in Potions O.W.L. in a hundred and fifty years, which meant that he'd beaten out the man himself. Having both her and Flitwick, in addition to Dumbledore, take him seriously and not dismiss him out of hand as just 'that greasy-haired Slytherin boy' made Hogwarts feel more like home than ever before.

* * *

 **A/N:** The drunken shenanigans one-shot is coming; RL is busier than I thought at the moment, leaving little time for new writing, but those who want to read it will get their wish. Additionally, apologies to those who have reviewed to whom I haven't responded as yet, it's for the same reason (end of the year and holiday season always mean racing to sort out everything time-sensitive in the lab, not to mention all non-work-related obligations, too, like Christmas shopping). I'll try to do it at the earliest possibility.


	30. Ch II,26: To Find Determination

**A/N:** Warning for canonical child abuse in Sirius' section

* * *

 **Chapter 26: To Find Determination**

The sun was shining. It wasn't anything new; this whole bloody summer, the big burning ball in the sky had been bearing down on the earth and heating the air until one could barely breathe outside. Sirius hated it with just as burning a passion, as he sat on the windowsill of his room and chain-smoked self-made fags using the tobacco from his potions kit, which he was always careful to overstock for just this type of occasion. The sun's rays breaking through the window illuminated the wisps of smoke that clouded Sirius' room like a haze, and he observed them mindlessly, feeling only satisfaction that for the rest of the summer, his possessions were going to carry with them the bitter whiff of the Muggle-beloved plant.

His fingers itched tenderly at the nailbeds, and Sirius could barely make himself look at them for how ugly they were, without the nails where they were supposed to be. The house-elves weren't allowed to use any but the basic medical aid magic when Sirius got punished, and speeding up the growth of his nails was definitely not considered priority aid.

At least they'd managed to mostly heal his feet; he'd spent the night under the bed afraid that he'd not be able to walk for the foreseeable future. In his dreams, his mother for some reason used that curse that had been inflicted on the Ravenclaw girl near the O.W.L.s, and Sirius kept constantly seeing himself in a wheelchair just like she'd been in, helpless and utterly at the mercy of his sadistic mother. But the next morning, he'd made his own way down for breakfast, and if it required more stubbornness than many would have been willing to expend, well, so be it. At least he wasn't dependent on anyone else.

He'd gotten to keep his wand this time, with the caveat of not performing any healing magic on himself of course, because Bellatrix had been just as destructive as he'd been, and even his parents, crazy as they were, couldn't have begrudged him fighting back in equal measure, no matter who'd started it. Sirius hadn't really been expecting that, because though he'd claimed that she'd been the first to raise her wand, he'd known for certain neither Walburga nor Orion would have believed him, but it was one of those times when he chose not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

The wedding was in little more than two weeks, and then two weeks more until he was back at Hogwarts, and forever out of this house. He knew this wasn't going to be the last such instance of punishment, and in fact, he predicted that he was going to be smarting for the stench that he'd built up in the room with the cigarettes. But those punishments he knew he'd earned – those, he could live with.

Those that had nothing to do with him were another matter entirely – which was why, when his mother barged into his room in the company of his aunt Druella and made him almost cough up a lung for having inhaled the smoke more deeply than usual in sheer bloody fright, he was caught utterly off guard when she narrowed her eyes, stared him down through the mist of smoke until he'd stood up, and marched up to him to grab him by his hair.

"Ruin the wedding, would you?"

"I've not done anything!" he exclaimed, grabbing hold of her wrist to make her stop tugging on his scalp; it bloody hurt. "What imaginary ruin could you _possibly_ blame me for? All I've been bloody tasked to do is shuffle papers about!"

"Is that so?" Druella demanded to know icily. Stocky and short, she was the source of Narcissa's light colouring, but certainly not the source of any of her daughters' beauties. Sirius had always thought her rather on the ugly side, though this was usually ameliorated by her relatively sedate and even-keeled personality. Not this time; now she looked more than a little angry. "How serendipitous, you little saboteur, when I've just received a rather insulting letter from Rhodesia Flint about her family's invite possibly being lost in the mail, because she simply cannot imagine they would not be invited."

"That's nothing to do with me," Sirius protested through clenched teeth. He didn't quite remember which invites he'd filched and disposed of, and which he'd altered, but he was quite certain that no one from the Flint family was in either group; they were middling in importance, the benefit of messing with their invites would have been minimal for the stink they'd probably raise, and thus certainly not worth Sirius' trouble. "I did as I was told, and Regulus was with me at the time." He gave up on trying to wrench Walburga's hand out of his hair and instead groped for his wand to cut the locks off. It was a crude measure, and one that made sharp stabs of pain shoot up his fingers, but he was quick about it, growling ' _Diffindo'_ under his breath as he dragged the tip of his wand under the trapped hair, and then he was free to stumble away towards his bed.

Walburga's response was to narrow her eyes angrily and toss his cut hair onto the ground next to his discarded, still-lit cigarette.

"I didn't do this, Aunt," Sirius insisted again, looking at Druella because he would have better luck appealing to her than to Walburga, and he didn't care about the punishment for the hair, he just cared about the invites, "and I wasn't the one who posted the invites, either! All I did was stuff them in envelopes."

"Is it, now?" Druella responded, lifting her hand up to stop Walburga's advance – she'd pulled out her wand, which Sirius had noticed but hadn't quite registered in the moment of panic. Apparently, Walburga was letting her take the lead; Sirius had a nasty sinking feeling in his stomach for it. "And why, pray tell, is Cedrella Weasley writing to Lucretia about sending a present for the wedding?"

Oh, _Merlin_ , that wasn't good. Oh, no, that wasn't good at all.

Sirius had sent invites to the disowned members of the family – Narcissa's sister Andromeda, Walburga's Squib uncle Marius, and Orion's first-cousin-once-removed Cedrella, who'd been disowned for marrying into the Weasley family – and he'd guessed that they'd do something in response, but he'd not thought that that would reach anyone before the actual wedding. And communicating with the disowned members of the family was strictly forbidden, so what in seven hells was Sirius' aunt Lucretia doing exchanging letters with Cedrella Weasley?

 _This_ , he'd done purposely, and he could deal with the punishment for that, but now they were going to confer the two things and it was going to be so much worse, because bloody fucking stupid Flints had lost their invitation, or were just stirring trouble.

"If I were to contact that wayward girl that I once called my daughter, would I find that she'd also received an invitation to Cissy's wedding, hm?" Druella asked, voice oily with displeasure. "Walburga always claimed that you were a nasty piece of work, and I always thought that she must be exaggerating, because Orion always insisted that you understood your place and role in this family. But d'you know what, Sirius? Your mother is absolutely right. You are _despicable_!"

Sirius flinched away from her, recoiled back, eyes falling to the floor as he struggled for breath and tried to convince himself that what Druella Rosier thought of him was absolutely irrelevant, she was just his aunt and not even by blood but by marriage. She didn't _matter_.

His chest hurt as if she'd physically struck him.

"It was just a joke," he said weakly, lifting his head though he couldn't make himself meet Druella's blue eyes. "I didn't mean anything by it, and they'd never have come anyway." Then, digging up some courage from some forgotten corner of his mind, he straightened, because the one thing he had to say on the topic was the one thing he firmly believed. "Andromeda deserved to know, she's Narcissa's sister."

"That Blood Traitor deserves to rot in hell!" Walburga exclaimed.

"And you with her, as far as I'm concerned," Druella finished the thought.

Then, before Sirius could even process the way she spun on her heels and marched out of the room, he was being again pulled forcefully by his hair, and he couldn't stop the pained exclamation from escaping him.

"Cut your hair to spite me, will you?" Walburga hissed at him. "I'll give you that haircut, then, shall I? _Diffindo_ , you wanted to use. I'll give you _Diffindo_."

It hurt, and tears sprang to Sirius' eyes as she kept his head angled down and cut off his hair in crude wand gestures that left shallow cuts all over his scalp and blood-soaked locks of hair scattered all over the floor of his room. The last handful she cut was the one she'd used to hold him down, and Sirius crumpled to the floor like a puppet with his strings cut, his head feeling as if on fire, blood dripping into his eyes and down the collar of his robes.

"And this Muggle filth," Walburga was saying above him. "I know _exactly_ where I'll put this out!"

And then she took the fag Sirius had been smoking and pressed it against his spine, at the point where his neck met his shoulders, and Sirius wailed, voice muffled into the crook of his arm.

It didn't last very long, and thank _fuck_ that he'd never bothered with Muggle cigarettes before learning to roll up a hand-made fag, because knowing the Wretched Woman, she would have just kept on going, lighting one after the other and putting them out on his skin until she'd run out of them.

"I warned you, you little deviant," Walburga declared, slamming the windows to his room open with a spell. "I warned you what would happen if you tried to ruin Narcissa's wedding, but you couldn't help yourself, could you? But if it's the last thing I do, I _will_ get you into line! You brought this on yourself, Sirius Orion Black. Now get up and go sit at your desk! You are going to write an apology letter to your aunt and your cousin, and it better be good or I will make you rewrite it until it is."

Shaking from terror and pain, Sirius did as he was told, clenching his teeth. He couldn't meet Walburga's eyes, not just yet, but he straightened his spine and marched himself to the desk, where he was presented with one of his mother's most beloved torture devices – a Blood Quill. Steeling himself, Sirius took hold of the quill and the parchment she expected him to fill out, and, wiping ineffectively with the sleeve and shoulder of his robes at the blood slipping past his eyebrows and blurring his vision, he tried to think past the now stinging sensation of the shallow cuts to his scalp and the itch of the cigarette burn, past the flaring pain of his wounded nailbeds, and searched for the best words he had to apologise for something that was only partly his fault.

Writing the letter was almost numbing, if such a thing as the scratching pain engraving itself on his forearm could be numbing. But it felt like just one more thing on top of all others this week, and there was a grey haze drawing over his higher mental faculties, one that was familiar enough for him to let it come, until he was almost sleep-walking through it, letting his by now trained mind come up with words that he was not going to remember as soon as that letter was out of his sight.

He'd fought it, once upon a time, back when Walburga had first begun using the Blood Quill as a punishment tool. He'd purposely written offensive and insulting things in those apology letters, he'd tried being sarcastic and underhanded in them, he'd even written a little ditty story caricaturing them all once. All it had ever netted him was another and another attempt, until the pain had eroded even his legendary stubbornness and beaten him into submission. By now he had stock phrases to use that seemed to satisfy her, his mind capable of stringing those together through the mental haze that he needed to struggle through the innate rebellion his pride and self-respect always put up. He hated himself for buckling under her, for being the weaker of the two of them and giving in, but Sirius was a connoisseur of pain, and the protracted, needlepoint-sharp cutting into the skin vividly outlining each loop and slash of one letter after another was for him perhaps one of the worst kinds of pains he'd ever had to deal with. It was a rare kind of pain that always went on and on and on, and unlike most other punishments, this was one that actually _could_ control to some point, by choosing how much or how little to write, how much or how little to struggle against it. He was never sure if that made it better or worse, that he was the maker and controller of his own pain, if that made it all right to bow down under Walburga's will and finish it quickly and precisely, or if it made him weak and worthless for having that control and choosing to not make a stand. Letting himself fall into a fugue of thoughtlessness, numbing himself through the pain, it had become the only way he could get through this hellish exercise of domination and submission.

It was better than the alternative.

The level of pain of those cuts on his head only registered after he'd finished the letter, rivalling that of the wounds on his forearm, and Sirius realised that he was _hot_ , oh, Merlin, it was _sweltering_ in the room and he was drenched in sweat and his clothes stuck to his skin from the blood, and he felt like dying, just in that moment.

Walburga read through the letter and Sirius held his breath, staring unseeing into the middle distance, somewhere in the vicinity of her hips, and when she moved he flinched involuntarily away.

"Get cleaned up," she ordered, which meant that she was satisfied enough with the letter – which meant that his punishment was over.

Sirius almost collapsed off the chair, and as soon as she'd walked out of the room and slammed the door in her wake, he scuttled into the farthest corner of his room and curled up, trying to will his heart to stop beating so maniacally. He wanted to turn into Padfoot _so_ badly, to just hide in the canine mind and forget about today, but he couldn't, because in a few moments, there was going to be a house-elf popping into the room to take care of his injuries, and he couldn't risk it. So instead he clutched his arm to his chest and kept himself as small as possible, and he cried into his knees, letting the tears wash out the red haze from his sight.

By the time Wilty popped into his room and started to gently coax him out so that she could clean and heal up his wounds enough that he could function but not so much that Walburga would protest, Sirius had managed to box up everything that had happened, and to convince himself that this wasn't so bad, this wasn't so unbearably bad that he couldn't get through another month.

But he was going to hope like hell that there were going to be no more nasty surprises in the coming weeks, because he wasn't sure he could handle another sneak attack like this one.

* * *

Being on the seaside with the girls proved different than being here with the boys in more ways than one, Lily was finding. For one thing, Clotilde and Mary actually wanted to find other beaches to visit, beaches that weren't private and deserted, Muggle beaches where they could lie on their towels with sunglasses over their eyes and surreptitiously watch the goings-on, the boys and men who played beach volleyball and horsed around in the water. By the third day of her period, Lily was fit enough to go with them, though she kept out of the water more often than not; she really didn't mind sacrificing a few days out of her three-week stay, so long as the sarong she'd bought was wet and cool on her skin and the parasol Alice had conjured shielded her from the direct sun.

Alice was staying for only a week, the most time she could spare, so they were all gearing their activities to her wishes. She seemed amused enough by their actions on the public beach, and Lily joined in willingly enough when Clotilde and Mary quietly debated the looks of one young man over the other, and loved it when Bettina made a flustered comment that cracked them all up and made them giggle like madwomen. Doing so also put a stark contrast to the difference between boys their age and young men in their twenties or thirties (none of them were too interested in older than that, most tended to sag around the middle and it was slightly slimy to boot, because of the age difference) – the boys that were still mostly gangly at that age, disproportional and hairless, only starting to build any sort of real musculature in their arms and legs and chest, and the men who were built and fully-developed, who more often than not looked like they exercised just for the sake of looking good, who were confident and comfortable in their own skin. Lily saw the attraction in the latter group, boy did she ever, but there was something very appealing in the former that she couldn't put her finger on, something that tugged deep inside her brain and whispered 'that might be for you'. Maybe it was the fact that she felt closer to those her age, more comfortable with the idea of them. Maybe it was that the former promised the opportunity to watch them bloom from insecure youth to confident maturity, where the latter were already finished specimens, feeling disconnected and displaced in her mind. Maybe it was the rawness that couldn't be hidden at that age, the openness that got rejected with age and the experience of pain.

One such a day, during a debate on the merits and drawbacks of facial and body hair, Clotilde seemed to pull out of the conversation, and Lily noticed primarily because she didn't have a firm opinion on the topic in either direction – for her, she'd found, facial hair depended entirely on the shape of the man's jaw and face (she'd not yet gotten the opportunity to actually kiss someone with facial hair, so as of now it was only an aesthetic-based opinion), and the only body hair she couldn't stand was on their backs (there were a few men with those walking around, and it squeaked her right out). Apparently, what had drawn Clotilde's attention was a group of girls throwing a ball at each other in the shallows, and by her face, Lily decided it was a pretty safe bet to assume she knew them.

What ended up being strange, really, was that when Clotilde got up with a distracted 'I'll be right back', Alice got up to follow her, leaving the three youngest girls looking after them perplexedly. Clotilde walked to the edge of the water and waved, and one of the girls separated from the group to rush her, leading to the two of them hugging rather enthusiastically. Behind them, Alice stood just out of reach with her arms crossed and all her Auror training in full force in her posture, a complete opposite of the first girl's behaviour

"What's all that about?" Mary asked, lifting her eyebrows in surprise. "I don't know her from H– school."

"That's not very hard," Bettina pointed out. "Maybe she's one of the older girls from Alice's old group?"

"No, I think she might be that one girl whose parents have a cottage right over by ours," Lily decided. "The Canadian one Clo talks about sometimes."

"Oh, _her_ ," Mary reacted with clear distaste. "I hope she doesn't invite her to our cottage."

"The way Alice looks, that doesn't seem a very likely possibility," Bettina mused. "I wonder what she knows about the girl."

"You can ask her tonight while I distract Clo."

"With what?"

In answer to Mary's question, Lily pulled her ponytail up. "My hair colour is horrid now, and I think I want a change in general. She'll know all about dying hair in one way or the other." Given that it was a public beach, they were all being very careful about their language. In response, both of her friends gasped an almost synchronous 'no!' and began talking over each other, trying to dissuade her. Lily could do nothing else but laugh.

"I didn't mean completely change the colour! I love being a redhead!"

"Then what did you have in mind?" Bettina asked.

"Maybe lowlights? Colour it through with blood red, like how Clo had it a couple of years ago? I just want it to pop in a way that doesn't scream 'carrot top'."

"You know, I think that could look really good," Mary decided thoughtfully. "You'll have to darken the whole thing back to your normal colour first, and then add them lower down, shade it through."

"And go for broke," Bettina suggested. "Dark red will look good with your eyes."

"But real blood red, not normal hair red."

"Okay, okay," Lily agreed with a grin, feeling more than a little excited about the idea.

"Will your parents make a fuss over it?"

She could bet her mother would hit the roof about it, and she thought her father might not be too happy either, and it felt daring to do something so outrageous, just so that she could watch their reactions. Lily licked her lips and shrugged.

"Probably. I don't particularly care; it's my hair."

"Are you angry with them? About separating, I mean, not about the, the other stuff?" Bettina asked softly, and Lily inhaled a startled breath, the feeling crystalizing now that it had been given a name.

"Yes. Yes, I am. With the both of them." She clenched her fists in her lap, felt her breathing pick up into a laboured pace. It burned like acid in her veins, and she had no idea why not, but she couldn't find a way to stop it, to stop the words from spewing out in a low hiss. "You know what I'm most angry about? For hiding it, for blindsiding me with it. Petunia got advanced notice, you know, because she lives with them, but who gives a shite about the other child, she spends practically all her time off at school anyway. And I'm angry with Dad about the affair, I am, but I'm _furious_ with Mum for not being willing to tell me a single thing about it. Because I don't deserve to know her thoughts, what she feels. Like I'm not good enough to comfort her."

"Perhaps she doesn't feel that she should burden you with all of it?" Mary suggested.

"More likely she doesn't want to articulate it to anyone. Words have power. Maybe she needs to not say it?"

"And what about what I need?" Lily challenged. "What about her responsibilities to me as my mother? Dad gets it; he's always gotten it, always. I don't remember the last time I had a proper conversation with her that wasn't about my Ho– school career, and how she knows that Severus is my childhood friend but she doesn't feel that he's such a good influence on me. Guess that last one's off the table now, she got her wish."

She was going into one of her rants again, and this was not the time or the place for it, so with some force, she swallowed the torrent of words in her throat and shook her head. She felt light-headed from the sudden anger, from finally giving voice to things she'd not dared think. She'd been blaming her dad, and that had been easy because his transgressions had been so very obvious and _there_ , because he made it easy by admitting it, by being contrite, by acknowledging it. But it was also easy to turn the tables on that front, because Lily's relationship with her father had, through all this time, been fulfilling and deep, because with him, she felt like an individual first, like her own person with whom he happened to share a parent-child bond, and with her mother, she was always the daughter first, always someone defined in relation to _her_ , always someone that fulfilled a role that left no room for deeper understanding and appreciation. The fact that her mother refused to open up to her about something that Lily was just as much in the middle of, was suffering about just as much in her own way, it proved it, because it went both ways – she refused to tell Lily how she was feeling, but in the four days that Lily had spent at home when it had all gone down, not once had Monica sought her out to ask her how she was doing, either, not once had she tried to learn of Lily's emotions about it all, the way Stephen had.

Whether or not she'd done it because she was incapable of externalising it, incapable of even processing it, irrespective of whether it was a fault in Monica herself or not, it didn't change the ultimate outcome – in the gale storm that was the breakup of her family, Lily felt abandoned by her mother.

"I'm angry," she said quietly, staring at her hands as she opened and closed her fingers, more an acknowledgement to herself than to the girls. "I'm angry for not mattering enough."

She felt the beach towel shift and grow taut under her thighs, and then Mary was sitting right beside her and wrapping her arms around Lily, pressing the chilly sarong against Lily's shoulders. Bettina's chubby fingers worked themselves between hers, too, and held on tightly.

"Sometimes it's too hard to get out of your own head," the plump little witch told her, voice sure and strained. "Sometimes they can't do it even though it makes them bad parents. It doesn't mean they love you any less."

"That's not the point, Betts," Mary answered quietly, still holding on tightly. "Love is supposed to make you care about more than just what's in your head, and if you're not willing to find a way, then relationships will suffer. We are none of us more precious to others than they are to themselves. It's instinctive, to protect oneself from hurts, even at the cost of our relationships. But it's not always _right._ "

"Yes," Lily agreed, tugging on the soft skin of her lower lip until the piece came off and the tangy taste of copper got stuck on her tongue with it. She met Mary's eyes, licked her lip again, wondered at how the girl knew this, what her own home life was like. "You can't afford for the other person to destroy you, no matter the love between you. But she's right, too. Maybe I just need to give her time to work through it. If this is something she needs to do to protect herself, I can't be hard on her, either. Dad destroyed everything stable we had at home. Maybe eventually she'd work through it enough to think of me, too." Even though the little girl deep in Lily's heart wept at the thought of not being good enough for her mother to remember Lily's feelings in addition to her own pain.

"Maybe you should consider which side of this thing you want to be on, as well."

"I don't want to pick sides." And that was the truth, too. She wanted both her parents, and picking sides meant losing one. "That's not fair."

"Life isn't fair, Lily. You're their child, and you're part of the family, and you can't be impartial, so much as you want to. You can act impartial, but in your head, you will have chosen sides by the end. That's how it always goes. So you might as well make up your mind before someone else makes it for you."

Lily wasn't sure what to do with that, and the return of Alice and Clotilde cut short any further discussion on the topic, for which she found herself grateful. She was starting to get tired of the topic.

* * *

The full moon was bright and round in the sky, and Lily idly gazed at it, wondering how Remus was doing, if his transformation had started already. He'd mentioned once that the transformation never started before the moon was completely full, but Lily wasn't quite sure what that meant in practical terms, or when precisely it'd be considered full by the astronomical charts tonight. She hoped that he was doing better than in June.

"You're still up," Clotilde greeted, padding on bare feet from kitchen to join her on the beach chairs.

"Can't sleep," Lily admitted. "The full moon always keeps me up."

"We could talk if you want, now that it's just the two of us."

It was exactly what Lily had wanted. If she was being honest with herself, she'd from the start most wished to hear Clo's opinion, because the currently-silver-haired girl had the most unconventional family life of all of them, and Lily needed to hear an unconventional opinion. She'd about expected each advice she'd gotten from Alice, Mary and Bettina, but they'd not really helped her make up her mind fully. She had a hunch that Clotilde would be able to put it into better perspective than everyone else.

"Did you ever think about which parent you wanted to live with?"

"Not really," Clotilde answered easily enough. "I have a very good relationship with _mon père_ , and I spend a third of my time with him, but he and I would not function very well as a family unit, not anymore. He tends to be overbearing when he feels comfortable, and I am too independent by nature. _Maman_ and I, on the other hand, are far more harmonious. She has always respected me as a person first, rather than as her child, which is more and more important to me the older I get. I don't know if you know this, but I used to alternate living with _Maman_ and Dad each month when I was very little. Her parenting style was not suited for a very small child, and she was responsible enough to admit that and try to find a solution. It's why she didn't raise me in France."

"Could I ask you – how come you were born out of wedlock?"

"Dad was on the tour of the continent, and met _Maman_ in Paris; she'd decided to spend a few years touring the Muggle world as an opera singer. They had a very hot and very fast burn, and by the time Dad had left Paris for Rome, they were pretty much done with forever. Except, of course, turns out he left her a bit of a present. They're great friends, and they probably could have managed some sort of lukewarm marriage, which is about par for the course in Pure-blood circles here, but _Maman_ wouldn't hear of it. She tried to raise me on her own in Paris for about a year before she and Dad agreed that it would be better if she moved to England for the decade. I almost ended up in Beauxbatons, but it seemed more prudent that I stayed here, given the trouble _Maman_ ended up having with her parents over me, and besides, I wanted to go to Hogwarts, like every other British wizarding kid. You'd think that this sort of thing would be better accepted in France than here, but that side of my family is _old_."

"Did you and your parents ever have any problems because of it?"

"Well, Pure-bloods certainly don't look at it very positively, but my last name also doesn't earn me much popularity, either. It's not exactly easy, but I think in your case it'll be overshadowed by your parents being Muggles; I'm sorry to say that most people won't care one bit about your parents after you tell them that."

"I'm quite aware of that, yes," Lily agreed with a roll of her eyes. "I didn't tell you all about this, but, Dad said that if I wanted them to, he'd try to patch things with Mum, even though he personally thinks they've reached their end point."

"That must have been upsetting."

"Yeah. I almost did it, too, but in the end, I was too afraid of making things even worse. It's why I needed to get away sooner."

"I don't think that'd be fair, if you were to ask him that. It's their life, not yours. I don't think you should be angry with your dad about the affair, either, not in itself. You have as much right to be angry at him for hurting her as we have at Snape for hurting you, it's shitty that he'd done that to your mum, but _why_ he had the affair in the first place, that's between them; you've got nothing to do with it. And you could summarily judge him for it, but if you do so, then you'll be acting like a child, not like an adult, and I think both of us agree that we can't afford to be children anymore."

"What does that even mean, though, Clo?"

"Well, the way I see it, when you start realising that your parents are just as imperfect as your peers, and you begin building relationships with them as individuals, not as part of a family unit or as your parents, then you've stopped being a child and started being an adult. It goes the other way, as well; they need to realise that you're no longer a child and cannot treat you that way anymore, because it begins to grate, it really does. I think I understand this better than other people our age because I grew up with this understanding. I didn't have a classical family unit, and my parents treated me so vastly differently that I always saw the contrast. So, you get to benefit from it, I suppose." Clotilde offered a sardonic smile. "You need to start reconsidering your relationship with them; two more years, and you'll be living on your own."

"But how do I do that?"

"Firstly, by not letting the shite that's between them get in the way. The affair is their betrayal, and it's only a part of the whole picture – how they see it, how they responded to it, what led to it in the first place, what happened in the time between it and now. You have to take everything into account when judging them about this mess, not just look at the most overt hurt. "

Shifting from laying back to laying on her side so as to more easily see Clotilde's face in the moonlight, Lily frowned.

"Overt?"

"You said that your dad tried to give you a pretty clear picture of how he sees the situation, and I don't know if you noticed, but you keep bringing up the fact that your mum is too stubborn and refuses to speak with you openly about it, and that your dad stressed the issue on his side is lack of communication between them. So I'm concluding that the reason they aren't communicating is because your mum refuses to do so, and that is a more discreet hurt, but it must still be painful for your dad."

Lily turned it over in her head, and found an immediate parallel in her previous relationship with Severus – she'd spent years feeling like speaking to him was banging her head against a wall, because he'd not wanted to listen to her, and not wanted to acknowledge her views and opinions. And now that she was thinking of it that way, suddenly, there was a very sharp pang of anger directed at her mother, because Lily was perfectly aware how much being shut out and ignored _hurt_ , and if that was what her father was feeling at home, constantly, then she couldn't exactly blame him for not being happy.

"Mum is like Petunia," she concluded, "neither of them is willing to bend much on her views and opinions."

"What exactly did your father tell you about all of that?"

"I don't... nothing much, I guess; he said..." She tried to remember exactly how he'd defined it. "He said that he was lonely and that this is why he started keeping longer hours at the university, and why the affair happened. But it's still... I don't know, the affair feels so... disproportional."

"Vengeful?"

Lily immediately shook her head. "No, my dad isn't the least bit that. I just don't see... it feels like it has to be emotional as well as communicative; I'd get it if it was just bad sex life, but the affair was definitely about more than just shagging, my dad's clearly still in love with this woman. How can you fall in love with someone if you're in an already emotionally satisfying relationship?"

"Loneliness doesn't sound like emotionally satisfying relationship," Clotilde pointed out. "But I think I understand what you mean. You think it's personal, in the sense of not just directionless loneliness because they weren't clicking anymore, but that she was doing something directly negative to him and pushing him away."

"I guess... maybe I do." She turned it around in her head, trying to figure out why this, clumsily worded though it was, sounded more correct. "I let Severus pull away from me for years, but I only... when he called me that word, that hurt a hundred times more." It still hurt, in truth, though Lily thought she'd made as much peace with that incident as she could have in two months. It still made her eyes sting if she focused on it too much. "And it was always worse when he argued with me, when he insisted that I wasn't seeing it right, when he accused me of not caring about how Potter and Black were bullying him but being so hard on his Slytherin friends." That he was right didn't really factor into this; when she'd felt pain and anger over it, she'd not believed it; she'd only later understood that the hurt was one of her own making.

"That was beyond unfair of him; you've been defending him from Potter and Black for years, and from what I've heard him say, he was never willing to acknowledge culpability on his group's part the least bit."

"I don't... I _really_ don't want to discuss him. I've closed the book on that," she said, more or less truthfully. "I was just making comparisons for illustration."

"Well, if you think there's something more there, you should ask your dad about it, then. He gave you the right to know when he offered you the decision on their marriage."

"I just... I doesn't feel fair of me to ask him this, but at the same time, if I don't, then it feels like I'm siding with him over Mum, and that doesn't feel right, either."

"Look, Lis, forget about all of that for a moment; do _you_ want them to stay together?"

"Of course, I..." Clotilde directed her a sharp look, and Lily's voice died in her throat. Nervously, she licked her lips. "I don't know. I... I suppose I want them to be happy."

"But you no longer think that they could be happy together."

"I..." She tried to swallow the lump in her throat, and her father's face during their last conversation flashed in her mind. "I don't think they could be happy together anymore. Oh, God."

Clotilde was out of her chair and sitting on Lily's in the next moment, hugging her tightly as Lily shook and shook, her mind and heart finally accepting the truth – she wanted both of her parents to be happy, and that meant that she wanted her family to fall apart, because it was better, for the _both_ of them. They could both get a fresh start, instead of living a life of lies and silent, unacknowledged misery. Whoever was at fault, however it had come to this point, the unadulterated truth was that there could be no going back; Lily had told Remus this exact thing, a couple of months ago – _sometimes people just can't stay together anymore; sometimes you try to be a different person, a better person, and that person isn't able to have the same connections to others anymore; and when it's like that, there is nothing left to do about it but just say your goodbyes and move forward_ – and it so honestly applied not just to friendship, but to every other kind of relationship too.

So she mourned, for the fact that this had happened to her parents, for the people they were and the people they used to be, and for the hurt they'd caused themselves, each other, and their two children without even truly knowing that was what they were doing. She mourned for the family unit that she was saying her goodbyes to, and she mourned for the life her childhood self had lived until this summer. But she didn't mourn for her own innocence and naiveté, and she didn't mourn for the belief that her parents were perfect, because those things, those things belonged to children, and Lily was no longer a child.

When she finally fell asleep that night, she slept more deeply than she had in weeks, in months maybe, and when she woke up, for the first time since she'd seen that woman kiss her father at that hotel in Manchester, Lily felt settled and determined – she felt all right.

* * *

The night of the full moon fell on Monday to Tuesday, and it wasn't any easier than the previous full moon. The previous month, Remus had still been reeling from losing his friends, and the wolf had let all that fury and raw anguish at being abandoned out on himself. This full moon, Remus was more settled; in a strange way, the two weeks he'd spent with Lily and Snape had shuffled him up inside, and in consequence, the wolf didn't feel the need to be angry beyond the usual issue of being locked and warded up. On the other hand, the full moon fell around one in the morning, which always made the wait seem too long, and the rest of the night heavier than Remus liked.

Lily called to check on him in the morning, so they chatted a bit about how the rest of her seaside holiday was going, and he was glad to hear that she'd made peace with what was happening at her home, and now had a plan for the rest of the summer. She asked him one specific thing during the conversation, about the night she, Remus and Snape had camped out by the dry riverbed and how her parents had reacted when he'd gone to tell them about it. She was adamant that he tell her the full truth, unvarnished, so Remus did, if reluctantly.

"It was getting to be relatively late when I went back to tell them where we were," he told her. "I think they'd started to get worried. They were arguing about it, actually, from what I could tell. So I went into the sitting room and I told them that Snape and I were with you and that you'd fallen asleep and we thought you'd be better in the morning if you could rest properly. Your dad agreed almost immediately; I think he understood that you needed a bit of a breather from everything. Your mum... she said no, flat-out, that you couldn't possibly stay out all night, with, um... with two boys. I think she misjudged me and Snape a bit, to tell the truth, she acted as if we would obey just because she's the adult, and Lily, I respect that she's your mum and that I was a guest at your home, but he and I agreed we weren't going to bring you back, even if it meant I'd have to pack up and go home the next morning. She wasn't very pleased with me when I told her I wouldn't do it because it was better for you to stay out and that Snape thought the same; she insisted that it couldn't possibly be 'in your best interest', though I'm not really sure if she meant it because it was dangerous or because you were with us. Your dad interrupted her, anyway, and he... look, this isn't pretty, and you wanted the unvarnished truth so... he said that he was putting his foot down, and that this time _his_ decision would stand, and that she could object all she liked, but that he was forbidding me from doing anything Snape and I thought might cause you more distress. So I left, but they were arguing about it the last I heard."

Lily had sounded part-thoughtful and part-exasperated when she'd thanked him for the description, and Remus hoped he'd done the right thing in telling her all of it.

Another letter from Peter arrived late in the day, asking how Remus was feeling and also bringing a final confirmation to an academic debate that had occupied Remus' mind for the last week or so since arriving home. The academic debate itself had also been started by Peter – Remus had in the end responded via Lily's owl to Peter's awkward, stilted attempt at re-establishing their connection, a few weeks late but clearly not unwelcome, as Peter responded back by Archimedes, his second letter both longer and more relaxed than the first, and including a question regarding Animagic. Given that Remus was the meticulous, bookish one in the foursome, it had never been a question of who'd do the actual research back in second year when Sirius had come up with the crazy idea of learning Animagic, after Remus' secret had been exposed. Remus had taken it on gladly, too, because if they were going to be the ones struggling to actually learn how to do it, the least he could do was make it easier on them.

So he'd been the one to look into the theoretical side of things and thus knew more, even in comparison to their practical experience in this type of transfiguration. Peter coming to him about it made that initial letter feel a bit suspect and thus hurtful, but Remus after a bit of thought let it pass – given Peter's general submissiveness to James and Sirius, if his own personal need to pump Remus for information was what gave him the courage to go behind their backs and try to rebuild his and Remus' friendship, then Remus was going to take what he could get.

Therefore, he'd answered Peter's question – whether Animagic would trigger the Trace or not – in the best way he could, meaning he made sure to be clear that he'd not found any firm facts on this issue one way or the other and that his own guess, no matter how well educated, was still that – a guess. Remus wasn't really a vindictive person by nature (though of course he had his little moments, as he suspected everyone did), and he'd never truly put as much blame on Peter's shoulders as he had on James' and Sirius' over what had happened at the end of the school year, so he didn't really even think about using this opportunity for some sort of revenge, never mind that this was a matter serious enough to put Peter in Azkaban if his illegal skill come to light.

They'd continued corresponding over the subsequent couple of weeks, skirting craftily around the group schism and the fight in June, and having their first true communication after that be in written form made things vastly easier. Remus, now more invested in truly understanding the person he was communicating with instead of simply succumbing to the group opinion of them (having learned that particular lesson well enough over the seaside vacation in his interactions with Snape), found himself noting that Peter did seem more open in private than in their group. Ruefully, Remus decided that the most likely cause for that was exactly what he'd noted to Lily back during their unfortunate trip to Manchester – like Remus, Peter was also marginalised next to the duo that was James and Sirius in their former group, so it stood to reason that he'd act differently when those two were removed from the equation.

He resolutely kept away from considering that any further; for now, he focused instead on deciding whether he wished to rebuild his friendship with Peter and whether it was even feasible to try, given how much under James and Sirius' influence Peter actually was. In spite of their correspondence, Remus had no doubt that Peter would quit communicating with him if the other two boys got wind of it and pressured him on that point; Peter had never been good under pressure, and while it did serve to bring Remus' opinion of him down a notch, the werewolf boy also didn't begrudge him this too much, because after all, hadn't he done the exact same thing with regards to the Marauders' treatment of Snape and other Slytherins, flaunting the rules of both Hogwarts and decency, and even the little hurts amongst their own group?

It was easier to make peace with the tenuousness of that friendship on the offset, now that he didn't feel nearly as lonely as he had at the beginning of summer. His friendship with Lily felt solid and real, even more so after he'd promised her and Snape that he'd keep things quiet. They'd trusted him with an enormous secret, and after watching them interact for two weeks, it wasn't even too hard to believe that he'd been told the truth. He was still going to keep his eyes open, and if all else failed, there was always Dumbledore, but for now, he was giving them the benefit of the doubt, because they'd earned it.

* * *

Lily ended up taking the Floo to Manchester on her way back home, and then the bus to Stoke-on-Trent, where Petunia picked her up. They exchanged mostly meaningless chatter about the three weeks, nothing they'd not discussed over the phone already, and Lily mostly studied her elder sister for signs of upset. Petunia looked calmer than she had three weeks ago, as well, so whatever it was that she'd gotten out of staying home for the three weeks – arranging to move to London with Martine Dalloway for her courses – must have been at least somewhat effective at getting her over the upheaval of their father's reveal.

"Father is staying in the guest bedroom," Petunia informed her once she'd parked the car in the driveway. "Mum has contacted a solicitor, but Father is putting her off, I'm assuming because he wants to speak with you about it." She clenched her hands on the steering wheel and swallowed, then turned her shrewd eyes to Lily in the passenger seat. "What are you going to tell him?"

"I'm going to tell him his decision is his to make, not mine," Lily answered softly, meeting Petunia's eyes. "But if you're asking me what I think about the whole thing... I think it'd be better if they separated, permanently."

"Good. That's... good," Petunia declared, almost superciliously, voice brittle underneath the attitude, and that was apparently that.

"Do they argue?" Lily asked the question that had been on her mind since her last phone conversation with Remus. "I mean, I don't think I've ever heard them, but I assume..."

Petunia shrugged.

"All very frosty and polite. Father is playing at acting both guilt-ridden and righteous at the same time, and Mum sees no reason to indulge him anymore. They are trying to contain it to the times when I'm out with Martine or my other friends, not that they're succeeding. Perhaps having you back will work better."

"I'm sorry that you had to go through all this alone, Pet."

"I don't need your pity, Lily," her sister snapped, glaring at her for a moment. Undeterred, Lily squeezed Petunia's fingers with her own.

"I'm not pitying you, Petunia. I'm just regretful that they'd put you through this in the first place, and that I wasn't there to share the burden."

Mollified, Petunia's shoulders dropped back down.

"I'm glad you weren't," her sister said. "One of us was enough, and I can handle the two of them. I've been doing it for years now."

"I know." She waited until Petunia had parked the car in their driveway before unbuckling and leaning to hug her sister, who responded with surprise but plenty of stiff willingness nonetheless. "I love you."

Petunia, clearly uncomfortable, shuffled in the embrace a bit, but settled after a moment, and Lily thought she heard her whisper: "You, too." Then she squeezed once and pulled away. "Mum should be in the kitchen."

"Thanks for picking me up," Lily said with a smile and exited the car.

She unloaded her suitcase from the boot and carried it back into her house, lamenting the fact that there were two more weeks of August and the heat hadn't abated one jot, which meant she was now back to sweating constantly and wishing to die just to escape the heat. She left unpacking for later and wandered back into the kitchen, where her sister had promised she'd find their mother, warring with herself the whole way over how she was going to interact with Monica in light of the decisions and conclusions she'd reached over the last three weeks.

Forefront in her mind remained firmly the thought that she was not going to let anything happen to push her towards one parent over the other; this was one choice that she was not going to let anyone either take from or make for her, and she didn't care if it was a choice against odds.

When it came to things that truly mattered, after all, Lily was just as stubborn and bull-headed as her mother and sister. It was time to put that particular personality trait to constructive use.

* * *

Until he'd seen it with his own eyes, Regulus could never have imagined what his older brother might look like with his scalp clean-shaven. It looked wrong, somehow, and even days after first coming face to face with it, Regulus couldn't quite come to terms with it – there was now a dusted stubble of new growth on Sirius' head, enough to conceal the scabbed cuts on his scalp from casual glances, but even so, the older boy looked pretty silly, as if with the hair he'd lost the aristocratic look, and now seemed thuggish.

Regulus knew for a fact that their father wasn't going to let Sirius be seen in public with such short hair; closely-cropped hair was one of those things that only Muggles sported, it was unseemly on a wizard, and no matter what Sirius had done to earn himself that punishment, it was only a temporary thing.

It hurt Regulus every time, to see the wounds on his brother's body. It hurt, because even though Sirius had rarely said a kind word to him since he'd gotten sorted into Slytherin, Regulus still loved – adored, even – his big brother, and he couldn't simply be ambivalent about what the other boy was doing to himself.

Regulus didn't particularly enjoy summers, though he didn't dislike them very much either. It was different for Sirius, but then that was almost expected, really. The older boy wouldn't have recognised subtlety if it hit him in the face, and most of the time, he didn't even seem to want to try to keep the peace. It was as if whoever had been handing out personal qualities had decided that Sirius really didn't need any self-preservation whatsoever. So it appeared that in Sirius' mind, doing things to intentionally provoke their mother's violent side made some sort of sense.

But then Regulus supposed that was exactly why he was a Gryffindor – because he didn't have a Slytherin bone in his body, and with every day that passed, he tried that much harder to prove this fact.

After the incident a few days ago that had resulted in Sirius sporting a bald head covered in scabbed lines, both their mother and Aunt Druella had summarily dismissed him from having anything to do with Narcissa's wedding, which was perhaps for the best, though Regulus resented it, seeing how Sirius' share of the work fell back onto Regulus. It was dull work, for the most part – keeping track of the changes to the seating arrangement, making sure that the house-elves were kept up to date with the million tiny, to Regulus pointless changes that the women made to the ceremony, receiving the RSVPs and cross-correlating with who else was supposed to respond to the invites, and so on.

Regulus resented Sirius for a lot of things, really, not least the fact that his brother couldn't settle the hell down and not cause mischief for one last summer. There were no illusions in Regulus' mind regarding the fact that the moment Sirius turned seventeen, he was going to be staying as far away from Grimmauld Place as he could. Really, given his history with their ancestral home, that was so much a given that Regulus couldn't quite figure out how their parents didn't seem aware of it – because they really didn't.

Father still at least pretended to entertain the idea that Sirius was going to be eventually taking over as the Head of House Black. Regulus honestly fully hoped that this was going to be the case, because he was the 'spare' in their equation and he'd always rather liked filling that role – their father often informed him that he was too quiet and unassertive, that he needed to learn to become more commanding, and Regulus knew he meant 'in case Sirius failed Father's expectations', which was a very reasonable concern and rather a probable outcome in the long run. But it was hard, and he didn't really want to do it, because Sirius was loud and assertive, and it never got him anything good at all. Regulus didn't think he knew balance any better than his brother did.

He ran interference, as much as he could, but it wasn't easy. Mother was distracted with Aunt Druella, but her senses were like a hawk's, sharp and partly focused on Sirius, always partly focused on Sirius, and that hole where Uncle Alphard usually fit in over the summer was now gaping open, and Regulus was far too small to fill it.

And he wasn't foolish enough to risk his own well-being for Sirius, either, not when Sirius brought most of it down on himself in the first place. Someone needed to be the good son, to learn to respect and carry on the tradition of their house. _Toujours Pur_ , those were their words, and Regulus had learned from Uncle Alphard and Aunt Lucretia that these words meant different things to different people, but that the underlying importance to them was equal for all – family first. And Sirius didn't seem to be grasping this at all, which caused Regulus no end of headaches. If his brother would just bloody _knuckle down_...

There were two further incidents between Sirius and Mother that Regulus was aware of, though comparatively smaller than the ones which had cost Sirius his fingernails and his hair. In the aftermath of both, Sirius looked worse for wear, his eyes gaining a distinctly forced look that concealed the sense of being haunted, only emphasised by the darkening of the skin around them in his brother's exhaustion. Regulus was rarely privy to Mother's punishments for Sirius and the house-elves always got around to his brother before Regulus could, so no doubt the worst of the damage was always taken care of before anyone could see it. These two times, he thought that the situation wasn't as bad as it sometimes was; he resolutely tried to not think about the fact that after all these years, he was no longer certain whether things really _were_ as bad as Sirius always seemed to silently project they were and the house-elves healing him was clouding Regulus' judgment, or if his brother's well-known tendency to exaggerate was coming to the fore in his attempt to make Regulus and the rest of the family think things were actually worse than they were. It only made Regulus feel helpless, and that was a feeling no self-respecting Slytherin could ever entertain.

Three days to the date of the wedding, the extended family began to arrive from all over the country. The wedding ceremony was going to take place here at the house, and afterwards, the wedding procession was going to be heading out for the reception venue that could accommodate all the invited guests, a bit complicated given the idea was to use a winged carriage and they lived in the middle of bloody Muggle London – and which ancestor decided that the best idea for the main seat of one of the most important British wizarding families would be a bloody townhouse in the middle of the Ton, Regulus didn't know, though he suspected it had to be the youngest son of some side line who'd unexpectedly gotten handed the position of the House Head due to death or mauling or foul play killing off the main branch, because this sort of idiocy stank of misplaced pretentiousness and lack of both common sense and subtlety, not to mention self-respect. But Grimmauld Place it was, and so they'd had to adjust, which meant using Thestrals (appropriately macabre for _this_ house and at the same time rather elegant) and some advanced magic to disguise the carriage that was to take Narcissa and Lucius to the booked venue, a lovely sprawling estate in Greater London with an enormous old mansion that just about covered their needs. Regulus had no idea how their father was going to be able to handle any of it with his heart, and how his mother wasn't going to have her head explode from the chaos.

By now, Uncle Cygnus, Aunt Druella, Narcissa and, to everyone's consternation, Bellatrix had practically moved in, taking up a room one pair each on the third and second floors. Sticking poor Narcissa with Bellatrix was cruel given everything, Regulus thought, but since the alternative was for her to share a room with him, he wasn't going to complain. As it was, he'd been relegated to Sirius' room in order to allow space for both Aunt Lucretia, Father's older sister, and her husband, as well as Regulus' maternal grandparents Pollux and Irma, who normally lived with Uncle Cygnus and Aunt Druella. Thankfully, the more distant branches of the family – the female branches, as it were – weren't going to be in house as well, though Narcissa's three best friends and bridesmaids were taking up a room on the second floor. With Aunt Druella's parents over every day to butt their noses in (as if there weren't enough noses already in the mess), the house was bursting at the seams, and Regulus himself was starting to go a bit batty in the head, so he could only imagine how Sirius was feeling.

He was certainly trying to hide the effects of stress from Regulus, though he wasn't being highly effective at it, which was about par for the course since he loved underestimating Slytherins. The silencing charms around his bed didn't prevent Regulus from noticing the frequency and severity of his nightmares, and there was even this strange tendency to paw at the bed almost as if he were an animal trapped in human skin and limbs. Regulus rather fancied he'd also noticed growling, except of course Sirius' magic was strong enough to keep all sound from escaping the immediate boundaries of the bed.

So yes, he wasn't blind at all to his brother's state, and he fretted about it rather more than he could afford. But when he walked into what was serving as the bridal dressing room two days before the wedding in search of some drawings his aunt required that very moment be provided for her and found the lavish, lovely, _magnificent_ wedding gown that had taken _months_ to sew and was the pride and joy of both Mother _and_ Aunt Druella covered in what his nose promptly informed him was blood – _bucketfuls_ of blood – still wet enough to be dripping off the mannequin into an ugly, dark puddle on the carpet, Regulus' first thought was ' _Not even Sirius would be depraved enough to pull a stunt like this_.'

With the sinking feeling in his stomach, Regulus realised that he was no doubt going to be the only person in the house who believed so.


	31. Ch II,27: To Bear the Past's Weight

**A/N:** Warning for canonical child abuse in Sirius' section

* * *

 **Chapter 27: To Bear the Past's Weight**

Concealing most of his memories turned out to be easy enough for Severus, once he'd processed the theory. In truth, it was mostly just about sorting the memories by their associative paths and constructing shields around them that were complementary to those associative paths. Since the point was to divert anyone who might attempt to follow those paths, one of the safer methods was to simply lead them down into a constructed memory, one that would in itself be effective enough to, if not expel the intruder, then at least shake up their hold on the Occlumens' mind.

But the effectiveness of that sort of defence relied on memory manipulation; those witches and wizards who weren't good at creating convincing fake memories usually used other methods. Severus had looked into them as well, but in the last few days, he and the Headmaster had focused primarily on this, because it had turned out that Severus was quite good at manipulating memories in his own mind; he thought they were leaving other means of defence until after this one was fully perfected. Memory manipulation was very tricky, as a good or thorough Legilimens knew how to differentiate them – it was always in the details, from the fuzzy edges of the memory to the background objects and personal ticks.

Dumbledore had demonstrated such with his Pensieve, by showing Severus a real, a fake, and a manipulated memory. They ended up spending almost an hour inside it, and it was a very peculiar experience, not only because Severus had never had an opportunity to observe memories from a third-person perspective, but also because Dumbledore, after explaining how the memories differed through a Pensieve, then demonstrated a memory of Legilimising Severus and how the perception of the memories from that point of view differed.

And it did – where the Pensieved memories were expansive, containing all manner of information that Severus knew couldn't have been remembered (though the information wasn't very detailed, as expected given that it must not have been perceived consciously), the Legilimised memories were narrowly-focused, their edges limited and softening, and two out of three seemed to be from a first-person point of view, a very dichotomous perception when viewed in a Pensieve, since it felt as if at the same time, the world was being shown from Dumbledore's perspective, and from Severus' own.

"This is usually not done, since it tends to confuse the senses," the Headmaster explained once they'd exited the Pensieve a second time. "However, it should be quite effective in demonstrating how precise the memory construction must be in order to deceive experts. Naturally, most times you won't have to go to these lengths, as Legilimens rarely rely on any such outside tool as a Pensieve, but the process of tricking both is quite different, and thus, if there is danger of your memories being extracted, you must take this into account when constructing the false memory."

"It does seem more prudent to learn how to do it from the beginning."

"Exactly right, my boy! It is easy enough afterwards to deconstruct the process into essentials should you find yourself limited for time."

The best way of constructing fake memories for beginners was to use elements of already existing memories, and Severus had little trouble with it. The trickier part was making the memory feel realistic enough to deceive an intruder, yet not so convincing as to confuse oneself – and both Dumbledore and the books on Occlumency warned about the danger of implanting false memories in one's consciousness.

"You must always create a trigger that would disperse the memory, should you need it," Dumbledore said on the topic, blue eyes grave as they stared Severus down. "Holding onto false memories for long will cause your mind and your magic to rebel, especially if your mind becomes confused as to which is the real and which is the false memory – your mind will sense your magic, yet won't be able to identify it, and will attempt to root it out. It has led inexperienced practitioners into madness."

"What about implanting false memories into the minds of others?" Severus asked.

"The most effective way is to have the memory's skeleton constructed and to implant it under the effect of a Confundus. The Confundus Charm will allow the mind to be open and malleable enough to fill up the details of the implanted memory and thus more easily accept it, while the person's magic will not recognise the more complex work you will have done from the more simplistic magic of the charm."

"So how expansively can this technique be used?"

"It is the cornerstone of Mutamency, in which case, of course, it can be pushed extremely far – as far as is necessary to completely construct and replace one's inner identity. Within the confines of Occlumency, however, it can be combined with inward-facing concealment techniques to temporarily replace vast segments of one's life without the mind rebelling, at least for a time. It is an extremely dangerous technique, but in cases when normal shielding techniques would not satisfy, it can be the only remaining option. But for that, you must learn to embed cancellation triggers that your magic will recognise easily enough, yet that would be completely unrecognisable to any observer, and these triggers must be both effective and ensure that your mind does not begin integrating the false memories in the place of those true ones you've concealed from yourself. We'll leave that for a later time; you will certainly not be needing that yet."

Instead they practiced emotional integration and dissociation, crucial for making the false memories convincing, as well as concealing true memories – strong emotions always made memories stand out, whether they clarified or distorted them, and in order for any sectional shields to be effective, no memory could stand out from the rest of the group. Given that the memories Severus most needed to conceal were all tied to supremely strong emotion, namely Lily and his feelings for her, this was possibly the most important part of his whole Occlumency training.

Severus had thought himself good enough to conceal the most cherished memories; he'd not quite, however, calculated two things into this conviction – one, that newer memories were always more vivid than the older ones and thus stood out more, and two, that alcohol distorted the memory enough he couldn't exactly treat it the same way as all the rest.

That was essentially why, where Severus had managed more or less to protect the recent memories of his summer, Dumbledore in the end dug up that drunken night, to such utter horror of the Occlumens trainee that his magic expelled the old wizard rather more violently than was normal, sending him flying back into his chair and toppling it right over, while Severus was left to clutch his head and battle through the humiliation of having that particular event revealed to his mentor.

"Well," Dumbledore said after he'd caught his breath a bit, the sight utterly comical – his wing-backed chair was on its back on the ground, and Dumbledore was still seated in it, his legs almost dangling in the air while the rest of his body was hidden away from Severus' eyes. "That was rather more than I'd been expecting, my boy. Do be so kind and assist an old man in getting to his feet."

Scrambling off his own seat, Severus did as he was bid, feeling like his head and neck were one big furnace, his mind bouncing between embarrassment at acting so ridiculously in the memory, humiliation of Dumbledore seeing it, anger at it not being private anymore, and horror at the fact that with it, he'd revealed both his own and Lily's nudity to one of the most powerful wizards in the world.

Dumbledore snapped him out of the pointless loop by placing a weathered hand on his shoulder.

"I have seen far worse than that in my life, Severus," the old man said kindly, "and I was a teenager once, hard as that may be for you to imagine. Youth is for such indiscretions, there is nothing to be ashamed of. And as for your other worries – well, I have been a member of this school's faculty for most of my life. Children's nudity is rather a hazard of the position in a boarding school. What I'd much rather discuss with you is your relationship with Miss Evans."

"What about it? We're fixing our friendship," Severus replied defensively, still feeling wrong-footed as Dumbledore guided him back into his chair and, righting his own, took his seat again.

"I am glad to hear that you've overcome the events of the school year's end. And you've perhaps come to some sort of understanding with Mr Lupin as well?"

"Some sort. He was visiting Lily for a couple of weeks."

"And you so happened to decide to make a seaside vacation of it?"

"No, it was..." Severus sighed, rubbing his face with his hand, feeling weary and resigned all at once, because he knew that the Kneazle was out of the bag now. So, disliking how much it felt like he was breaking some sort of promise, the Slytherin nonetheless explained the events of the summer to the old wizard, who listened as attentively as he'd done when the topic had been Severus' parents and didn't give any indication as to his opinion on the matter. Hopefully the Headmaster wasn't going to look unfavourably on Lily because of her home situation given his presumable progressiveness, but then Dumbledore _was_ of a much older generation, and he could be incredibly biased against things that didn't suit him (case in point, his favouritism of Gryffindors over all the other houses, but especially Slytherins).

"It is good that you were there for her in her time of need," was the first thing Dumbledore said once Severus had fallen silent.

"I just hope it was enough," Severus admitted.

"Miss Evans is a resilient young woman; I have no doubt that she will get through this. And it is quite admirable of you to make peace with Mr Lupin for her sake, as well."

"Yes, well, I didn't have much of a choice, did I?"

"You could have chosen to keep to your grudge, Severus. I know that is what you would have been most comfortable with."

"I am not risking our relationship, whatever it is, for anything, not again," Severus said firmly, meeting the Headmaster's gaze steadily. "I did what I had to."

The old wizard ran his hand over his beard thoughtfully for a few moments, before leaning forward.

"Have you spoken with her about the particulars of how you came to your decision regarding this war?"

The question made Severus frown, before he realised what it was that Dumbledore was referring to. Feeling his stomach drop, he clenched his fists on his knees.

"No, I've – we've not – no, I don't think –"

"Severus, when we first came to our arrangement, I considered whether it would be prudent for Miss Evans to be aware of it. It was a risk, given the fact that Mr Stone was already aware of it by the very nature of his role in the deception of your other housemates. But I felt the risk was worth taking, because I am not so foolish as to think that myself and my regard for you would be the primary motivator for your future actions as the spy for the side of Light. Miss Evans is a trustworthy person, and it was clear to me from the moment she stepped into this office in March to berate me for the way I had handled the incident at the Shrieking Shack that she cares deeply for you and your friendship. She could be relied upon to protect your secret with her life."

"Yes, I know that, however–"

Dumbledore raised his hand to silence Severus, who exhaled shakily, wishing that he could just get up and pace but not daring to do so.

"I believe – and I think you will agree with me – that one of the reasons why Miss Evans' family situation this summer has been so fraught is that she feels betrayed by her parents. This is a perfectly natural reaction, and to be expected. She certainly must feel as if her parents had lied to her regarding their relationship, given how unawares she was apparently caught by their separation. She turned to you and Mr Lupin in her time of need. Therefore, what she needs is to be able to trust you, Severus. That is why I agreed to inform her of your decision regarding the war, and that is why you must tell her about your part in the attack on Misters Shafiq, Fairlot, Vemeer and Miss Shanwick. The chances of her discovering this are high, given her connections to this group, your connections to Lord Voldemort's organisation here at Hogwarts, and the presence of the rest of the attackers at the school for the foreseeable future. How do you think she will react if this information does not come from you?"

Oh, Severus knew exactly how she was going to react, he remembered just how angry she'd been after she'd witnessed Holland Vemeer screaming in pain from that old Germanic spell that Philes had dug up somewhere or other. If she were to learn that Severus was directly involved with that, and that he'd lied to her about it...

He found himself shaking his head nonetheless.

"I can't. If I tell her, it will have all been for nothing. I cannot."

"If you do not, and she learns it from another source, she will _not_ forgive you. If _you_ tell her, you will yet have a chance to show her your regret over the sorry business."

"That makes no difference to my actions," Severus shot back harshly, breathing ragged, heart beating frantically in his chest. "To her, they are unforgiveable."

"To her, your remorse will be more important than your guilt, Severus. And if she cannot see that you truly wish to take that day back, then at least you will know this, as well, instead of having it hang over your relationship like a notched axe. Proceeding further without informing her of a thing such as this will only result in your friendship being constructed on another lie."

And it wouldn't survive it, not after everything that had happened before.

What Dumbledore was saying was logical enough; the problem was that Severus was terrified of the consequences. He wanted to believe the old wizard, he wanted it so goddamn much, but he couldn't, because he knew Lily far better than their Headmaster ever could, and he knew that telling her was going to undo everything he'd tried to achieve this summer, every frustrating moment, every request he gave into, every attempt he made to make her life easier and their relationship smoother. Telling her was going to mean losing her, and Severus didn't know how to handle that.

Dumbledore's hand on his shoulder pulled him out of his panicky loop, and there was a terrifying amount of compassion in those blue eyes that stared into his very soul.

"It will eat you up, my boy, and the longer you postpone it, the worse the consequences will be."

"And what about – after Hogwarts, after – when I'm in the Dark Lord's circle –"

"Those actions will be necessary, a sacrifice you will make for Miss Evans and the rest of the Wizarding world, and she will understand that. And when that time comes, you will discuss and negotiate with her about how much to share and how much to hold back. But this is not the same. This situation differs, and so must be handled differently. You see that, do you not?"

Severus swallowed and nodded, fighting for every breath. He didn't know what to do about this, but he did see the difference, of course he did, and he knew that the whole thing was inevitable, that the adage was correct – the truth must out.

He just wasn't sure whether he wanted it to out now, when he was terrified of messing things up and losing Lily again, or whether he wanted to cling to the hope that it would never come out, and risk the possibility that he and Lily could improve their relationship until he'd be certain that losing Lily would utterly destroy him from the inside out.

* * *

As Lily had worried, her mother barely gave her enough time once she'd wandered into the kitchen to kiss the older woman's cheek before she fully turned, studied Lily a moment, and overreacted.

"What did you do with your hair?!"

Yesterday afternoon, the four Gryffindor girls had sat down and debated how to dye Lily's hair. Clotilde had been the one who'd done it this time, and she'd also promised to teach Lily how to do it herself. It was a curious combination of magic and non-magical means; Clotilde got rid of the sun-bleaching effect with a few beauty spells, mostly transfiguration spells but one or two charms, too, and then used Muggle dye to darken the bottom bulk of Lily's hair into a red that couldn't possibly exist naturally. Clotilde had explained that it was easier if the pigment was chemically embedded into the follicles, as changing hair colour was usually transfiguration-based magic, and transfiguration spells couldn't be permanent. Nonetheless, she'd used magic to create a shading effect that had Lily's natural dark red hair turning into the blood red at the ends without a jarring transition, which she described with the French word ' _ombré_ '. The result was almost shockingly effective at bringing out the green in Lily's eyes, and giving her overall a fresher look with her now quite deep tan that had previously been blending a bit too much with her hair. Lily _loved_ it, and more than that, she felt like it was a visible mark of the way she'd changed over the summer, something to remind herself every day looking in the mirror that she wasn't the girl she'd been in March, or even in June.

So naturally, her mother disliked it.

"Dyed it some," Lily answered shortly.

"Oh, your lovely hair..."

"Mum, my hair is still the same up top," she pointed out, needlessly in her opinion. Also, probably pointlessly.

"Lily, darling, if you're... if this is..."

Huffing in exasperation, Lily rolled her eyes. "No, Mum, this isn't any sort of rebellion on my part because you and Dad are splitting up. And it's not like I've dyed it black or bleached it to platinum or something, it's still mostly my colour."

"But why would you feel that was necessary? Your hair was so lovely the way it was. And what will your professors think?"

"It was turning some disgusting shade between peach and blonde, Mum; three weeks in the sun tends to do that. Which, incidentally, you haven't asked me anything about. I had a lovely time, thank you. As for my professors, they wouldn't care one bit if I'd dyed it green, except maybe if I'd gone for the Slytherin shade."

Her mother's contrition was immediately obvious, and Lily sighed internally, berating herself, because she was being curt with her mother over something she hadn't tried to tackle first, and hadn't she learned her lesson in doing so with Severus?

"Mum, the hair is really not a big deal," she tried again, more conciliatorily. "Clotilde has all sorts of hair colours every semester, and no one has ever said anything about it."

"But you had a good time with her and the other girls?"

"Yes, it was very nice. We stayed for the most part on Clotilde's family's part of the beach, it's warded against unwanted visitors, but we also went to a public beach a few times. And look at my tan! Can you ever remember me being brown as a nut?"

"Yes, you've a lovely tan. Of course, three weeks by the sea will do that, especially in this weather," Monica agreed.

"Alice could only stay the one week – she's terribly busy with her training, see – but I was very glad she could manage it at all, we hadn't seen each other since the end of the last schoolyear. Oh, I've forgotten to mention it over the phone, she's getting married next summer, and she's asked me to be her maid of honour!"

A happy smile spread over her mother's face. "Oh, how lovely!"

"You'll help me with whatever I've got to do for her, right, Mum? The dress and all that? I imagine hers and Frank's mothers will organise the wedding itself, but now I think of it, I've no idea what being a maid of honour actually entails."

"Yes, of course; don't worry, love, we'll figure it all out together."

"Thanks, Mum. So how've things been at home?" Lily ventured to ask. "How are you doing with everything? Petunia says you contacted a solicitor?"

"Yes; I'm quite determined to have all this unpleasantness done with as soon as possible. Your father is the one who's been stalling, and really, the cheek on the man, when he's the one who started all of this in the first place!"

"Perhaps he wanted to give you both time to reconsider it one last time?" Lily suggested, more to see what her mother's reaction might be to the idea than because she believed it to be true. In response, Monica's face twisted into a disdainful grimace that spoke its own story. Sighing, Lily leaned her weight against the edge of the dining table. "So, you didn't think about it at all? Trying to fix things?"

"What's there to be fixed? He's certainly made up his mind."

"But you don't want to fight for your marriage _at all_?" Blinking, Lily found herself gaping at her mother a bit. "You'd just let him go, like that?"

"You should know better than anyone what he did to me, Lily," her mother snapped, making Lily jerk in surprise. "I have my dignity; he will not take that from me, as well."

"Dignity? What about love?" Sudden suspicion made her straighten back to her feet. "Mum, when did you figure out about him and that woman?" Turning her back to Lily, Monica moved to the fridge and began reordering things in it. "It was well before now, wasn't it? I reread Petunia's letters to me from the last semester, she was dropping hints in them about you two not getting along as far back as January. Mum, how long have you known?"

The jarring, noisy clang of jars and bottles and containers continued for another few moments, before Monica straightened and smacked the door of the refrigerator forcibly back into position.

"I cannot see how this is in any way relevant to the situation."

"It's relevant, Mum, because according to him, that happened _two years ago_! If this is about starting a new life with another woman, then he'd have done it then, not stayed and tried to make your marriage work."

"He did no such thing!"

"You tried marriage counselling, so obviously he tried _something_! And that Easter trip last year, wasn't that meant to give you a fresh start? You said things had been better after your rough patch two years ago until recently, that's got to mean something! And if you've known for months that something was up, that, that... oh, I don't know, that this woman was competition or something, then why did you just ignore it, instead of trying to work things out?!"

"Because I should not have had to compete in the first place with that, that... slag! I have been his wife for more than twenty years! Am I not entitled to his love more than she is?! And they may have kept things innocent for the last two years, but she has been standing between us every single day of those two years, don't you dare be foolish enough to think it's not true! He has not even _tried_ to put a stop to it, and yet it should be expected of _me_ to run after him and try to keep him by my side?! My own husband, whom I had pledged my life to?!"

Standing in their kitchen, listening to this woman who wore her mother's face, Lily experienced a profound moment of utter disconnect, because the meaning of her mother's words wouldn't quite register, making them sound like utter gibberish. Perhaps it was because of everything that had happened between her and Severus in the last few months, the lengths to which Severus had willingly gone to because of his genuine love for her, would have continued on that path even if he and Lily were nothing but former friends passing each other in the school hallways sometimes. Perhaps it was that she'd spent the summer wrestling with the question of choice and duty in relationships, favours and manipulations, investment and reward. Maybe it was that being forced to acknowledge how she'd contributed to the deterioration of her and Severus' relationship that day of the Hogsmeade visit had also made her realise that it _always_ took two to ruin something that only existed when there were two people in it in the first place, no matter how the blame was spread around, how heavily the burden of fault fell on one or the other side, because previous actions fed subsequent ones, and negativity fed negativity, a vicious feedback loop.

No. No matter how despicable her father's actions were in regards to his infidelity, Lily could not lay all the blame on him, because Monica had placed hurt feelings and her sense of pride over love cultivated for twenty-five years and more, because even when she'd so clearly had all the puzzle pieces to see that Stephen was reaching out for her, she had chosen to disregard it for a reason she was not going to divulge, not to Lily. She could have left him over it the moment she'd figured it out and Lily wouldn't have though a single bad thing about it, but she'd chosen to stay even when she'd not wanted to do anything to improve things, pawning off the decision onto Stephen and then being angry with him for making it.

If it came down to the length that one was willing to go to, in order to preserve something so precious to them as love and life with another person, then Monica was certainly not anywhere ahead of Stephen in that count. Whether he'd truly spent two years trying to fix things with her mother while having that woman on her side or not (and Lily wasn't convinced by her mother's convictions in that regard, not when she was contradicting herself on them so much), the fact still was that her mother had shown just how highly her marriage to her father ranked in her priorities by doing nothing in the last half year, after she'd cottoned on to the fact the marriage was circling the drain. For all that she'd been wilfully blind to some of her own faults, Lily had at least fought her damned hardest to preserve her friendship with Severus, back when they'd initially started pulling away from each other and most certainly after the mess in June. And she also understood how important it was to know the other person was fighting just as hard – after all, Severus had willingly given up his freedom and his future to Dumbledore and the Light's cause for Lily, and that still stopped her breath in her chest if she thought on the magnitude of it for too long.

It didn't matter so much, in the end, that what existed between Lily and Severus was platonic, was nowhere near as rich in history and shade of emotion as a marriage of twenty plus years. It only mattered that the parallels were so very clear to Lily, and that they gave her the tools to understand the situation between her parents in a way that allowed her to come to terms with what _she_ was choosing to do about it, which was put her individual relationships with each of her parents above everything else in this situation.

"Love isn't something you're ever entitled to, Mum," she said in the end, when her mother had fallen silent. "It's something you earn and you nurture, and if you start thinking you're entitled to it, that it should be unconditional, then you start neglecting it, and you lose it."

Monica crossed her arms over her chest. "And what is love within a family, if not supposed to be unconditional?"

Lily shrugged. "Severus' father beats him when he's drunk because Severus is a wizard; would you say he nonetheless loves Severus unconditionally, or that he's entitled to Severus' love just by virtue of being his father?"

"That's entirely different."

"Only because you refuse to admit that you carry at least some blame for you and Dad breaking up."

She left her mother to do with Lily's words as she wished, and instead found her father in his study, where Archimedes was already sleeping on his perch in a small fluffy ball of feathers. And where her mother had welcomed affection but had been utterly dismayed by Lily's physical change, her father was reserved in greeting but complimented the colour, telling her that it looked lovely and that it suited her.

They both knew that this was not going to be the time for small-talk, the tension almost palpable in the room as Lily closed the door and leaned against it.

"How was your holiday, love?" Stephen nonetheless asked.

"Good. Really good," Lily answered, nodding her head lightly. "I want to ask you a few things, about you and Mum and, and... Jocasta."

"All right."

Taking a breath, she pushed herself off the door and took a seat in the vacant armchair, taking her time before meeting her father's eyes.

"You said that it's about not having any sort of deep connection anymore, you and Mum. You said that that's why you've been lonely and unhappy. But..." she licked her lips, then barged on, "but that's not the only thing, is it? You said that you give into Mum too much. That... your relationship was on her terms. What did you mean by that?"

Stephen sighed and leaned back in his chair, running his fingers through his beard resignedly.

"I don't... I don't want to influence how you think of your mother, love."

"I hardly know _what_ to think of her anymore, Dad," Lily told him. "She won't say _anything_ about her feelings to me, no matter which way I ask her. I tried to press her about it again just now, and the way she sees things... I just, I never before realised that she was so... shallow, emotionally. Or no, not shallow – immature. It's... I don't know, it's disturbing, Dad."

"You thought her perfect," her father vocalised what Lily couldn't. "You thought the both of us perfect, because we're your parents, and now we're disappointing your perceptions, making you realise that we're only human, and you don't know what to do with that."

"Clotilde said that was part of growing up."

"Yes, I agree with your friend. I just wish we weren't showing our worst sides to you; dealing with the truth of it is hard enough."

"So you see that I'm not so naïve to let only your words make my decision on this for me," Lily argued. "Dad, please. Petunia, when she wrote to me about the position in Bristol, said that ' _this seemed like one of the rare times Mum won't get her way_ ' and that ' _everything she's tried has failed_ '. And _you_ told me that you never engage with her, but... you were sugar-coating it, weren't you? What you really were saying?"

"Lilyflower..." Stephen grimaced and ran his hand over his face, before a look of resignation settled on his face. "Yes, I was, because I know you, and I know how independent you are, and I was worried about how you'd... interpret it."

"So tell me and let me have that choice, Dad. I get that you feel guilty about Jocasta and the divorce and everything that happened, but it's not like Mum's completely blameless, either, I know that most often, both sides are at fault when a relationship falls apart."

"Mine is the far bigger burden of guilt, love."

"Yet you're the one who's admitting to that guilt, and she isn't," Lily pointed out sharply. "Dad, you put the burden of decision on me, and that wasn't fair even if you'd given me _all_ the pertinent information, which you didn't!"

"Because that question is about _your_ feelings, Lily, not mine or your mother's. It's about directly influencing _your_ place in this family."

"But I'm not the only affected person _in_ this family, Dad!" she cried out in frustration. "It's not just about how I feel on becoming the child of divorcees and having two homes and splitting Sunday dinners and everything else. It would be _selfish_ and, and..." Taking a forceful breath, Lily switched course. "Some stuff happened to me this year, stuff that made me think a lot about who I am and how I treat people. I was judging everything from only my point of view, and I was resenting people and situations when they didn't fit the way I saw things. Severus and I almost stopped being friends altogether because of it, at least in part. Petunia and I have had a _horrible_ relationship for years, because I never stopped to think about how _she_ saw _me_ and my actions, only ever how _I_ saw _her_ and her actions. And now you're asking me to do that same thing in regards to your relationship with Mum, and your relationship with Petunia, and Petunia's relationship with the both of you, and _my_ relationship with all three. I don't have that right, Dad."

"You won't give me an answer either way, will you?"

"No," Lily admitted. "I know Petunia did, and three weeks ago, I wanted to, but that's why I needed to step back and try to think it through properly. I can't act impulsively anymore, I'm not a child. You said it, Dad – you're divorcing Mum, you're not divorcing me or Petunia. What right do I have to tell you what your relationship with Mum should be? I'm barely home as is, I'm not there to see it. That's been my problem from the start, because I _didn't see any of this_. And you know, I realised over the holiday, that's what I'm most upset about, that I was the only one who got blindsided by this, that you all knew something and I wasn't included. It's your fault for not keeping me informed, when I'm wholly dependent on your letters to know about _anything_ going on here, but part of the blame is on me, too, because Pet's right, I've crawled so far into the wizarding world that summers and Christmases here feel like a momentary vacation from my real life, more than an actual part of it, and so what right do I have to dictate how things here should go, when I'd reap the least benefit from it?"

Only when she fell silent did Lily notice that she'd made her father cry. Stephen stared at her with glassy blue eyes and smiled almost painfully, proudly at her.

"You've grown _so much_ , and I don't even know how," he whispered, shaking his head. "I wish I'd gotten to see it."

"No, you really don't," Lily answered, smiling tumultuously as she almost jumped out of her chair in order to hug him tightly, letting him pull her into his lap so that she didn't have to bend awkwardly down. "You'd have been ashamed of me."

"I am so very proud of you now."

She squeezed him tighter for a long, long moment, and then gently disentangled herself to let him gather his composure while she resettled into her seat.

"The truth, Dad. Please."

He inhaled a deep breath and nodded, releasing it softly as he swiped his fingers under his eyes.

"The truth. All right, the truth; but please, don't judge your mother harshly, darling, not ever. You can judge me all you like, I can handle it, but she needs you now, the both of you."

"I think I deserve to decide how I will judge people, Dad, and on what grounds," Lily pointed out, crossing her arms over her chest. "I know I'm too judgmental by nature, and as I've said, I've been trying to work on that this summer, but it's still my choice. And I _am_ judging you; I've just for once in my life decided that I won't let that judgment stand in the way of my relationships, not with you and not with Mum. Mum's got me, _always_ ; that, you don't have to worry about. So please."

It was the best he was going to get from her, and Stephen knew it. Nodding, he finally fully acquiesced.

"The truth is that I don't feel that my choices and opinion have any impact on my marriage to your mother. There are a lot of causes to blame for this, not least the fact that I didn't feel like fighting Monica on most things, and the fact that she's less than willing to see things any way other than her own."

Lily groaned softly and shook her head. "I guess both me and Petunia get that from her, then. Was she like that from the start?"

"Not exactly. She'd always had that forceful streak, and I cannot say that I've ever liked your grandparents or approved of the way they'd treated her before we met, but... I've found that people become more set in their ways as they grow older, and that's certainly been the case for both of us. After you left for Hogwarts, we started arguing more. She didn't like that she couldn't tell all her friends which school you went to, so I think she was overcompensating for those lies we had to tell by lifting the wizarding world and therefore you to a higher pedestal."

"And that's what snowballed into what she does now," Lily concluded. "Her ridiculous praise of anything magical over non-magical, that's affecting Petunia's opinion of me."

"And I'm certain I never helped by pulling back and letting her do it unchecked. Our arguments were rarely ever as... bombastic, as the one we had the Christmas you stayed at school. It was more that she'd say something that I felt was an exaggeration in some way or other, and I'd contradict her – not in any way that I thought might be interpreted as malicious or purposefully designed to 'put her in her place', I have tried to never be that type of man who thinks his wife's only role in life is cooking and cleaning and raising children – but you know that embellishment is one of the things I have issues with," Stephen continued. "She'd wait until we were home to express her hurt over my actions, so eventually I stopped doing it, because I wasn't getting through to her that she was being inconsiderate of the accomplishments of our friends' children, and that was only causing friction between us. I thought it wouldn't matter too much, and there is a certain separation between my friends and hers. In the process, I also missed the way this was affecting Petunia, because she eventually started speaking this way to me at home as well, and by then I'd become so used to it that I summarily ignored it altogether. It never helped that I was eager to learn more of the wizarding world from you, and it _was_ one of the remaining topics that we shared until very recently."

"And the rest? The stuff not tied to me and my magic?"

"It was more or less the same thing. We'd disagree on something, I'd give in one way or another, and by the time I reached a point where something was important enough to me to stand by it, she had become so immovable on it that it would end with her getting her way and me resenting her for it. Weekends away, conferences I'd have to take, dinners with friends, big purchases around the house, conversation at our meals, the way we took care of my mother the year before she died, her finding a job or hobbies outside of you and your sister, your friends, Petunia's future, and most of all, our personal issues."

And the little things like those unfolded in Lily's mind, spreading out the last few years, situations where her mother had simply declared how something would be, and either no one complained or else someone would put in a token protest before being steamrolled one way or another – more from this summer than any other, because Lily had been almost paranoid about the tension in the house and had constantly been picking up on things, but now that Stephen was putting it in the correct light, it made his story and their separation make so much more sense. Her thoughts settled in the end on the way that Remus had described that Friday evening when he'd told her parents that they'd be camping out by the riverbed. It had been what had started Lily thinking on everything.

"It's her way or highway."

"She pushed for her way, and in that, I felt that she had utterly stopped giving any value to any of my opinions or wants. It's... suffocating... but it's also as much my fault as it is hers, Lily. I've let our relationship reach this point, and hadn't seen that it would be far too late by the time I had."

"But she's the one who isn't willing to work on it, no matter how many times you tell her."

"I think by now, she can't change anymore. And I can't, either; this back-and-forth that we had, it's influenced me as much as her, and not for the better, either. I withdrew, kept myself away from her, lied to her, betrayed her. It is the biggest mistake that I have ever made, being reluctant to find a way of communicating all that was bothering me when there had still been time enough to fix things. I am trying to make things right, Lily, because I don't like these people that we've become, but the fact still is that we reached this point of no return with both our efforts."

"Did you ever manage to explain all this to Petunia?"

"Not the way I wanted to; she blames me for betraying Monica, and I can't fault her for it."

"Plus, she can nurse a grudge like nobody's business," Lily agreed. "I can try talking to her, but–"

"No; you two are working on your relationship now, I won't get between you two. Pet will come around."

"I hope so." Lily knew what her next question should be, but just in that moment, she knew there was no way she could verbalise it, not just yet. So instead, picking at a hangnail absently and fighting down the upset in her stomach, she asked another, equally loaded one: "When are you moving out?"

"I've found a two-bedroom flat in Manchester to rent," Stephen admitted. "I haven't signed the contract, but it's uni-affiliated, so I have assurances they'll keep it until the end of the month."

"I'll help you pack and move your stuff, then, maybe get Severus to help out, too. We can't use magic, or it'd be faster, but..." helplessly, Lily shrugged. The thought was almost physically painful – living in the house, sleeping and eating and reading and watching telly, and doing it all without her father's presence somewhere in the background, the knowledge that he was there if she needed him. But she knew that there was no point, and probably some harm too, to postponing things. She also knew that she'd feel more settled going to Hogwarts if she knew her dad was at least somewhat sorted out going forward. "So..." Lily said after a moment of silence, mentally fortifying herself for the most distasteful part of the conversation, finding that she was out of stalling tactics and self-tolerance in equal measure. "Tell me about Jocasta."

Stephen inclined his head, seemingly himself bracing for the next few minutes.

"Jocasta was my student four years ago, for two semesters. She is a bit older than the usual crop of undergraduates I teach, in her mid-thirties, and we became friends through our shared passion for military history, though she'd attended primarily my courses on economics and societal history. But I was no more close to her than my assistants. We had the occasional lunch at the cafeteria after she completed my courses, but that was all. She had a very interesting, though a bit peculiar, approach to both lectures, and I was interested to find out how she'd come by her views. I was... attracted to her, yes, but it's a common enough occurrence, and nothing I'd not dealt with before by simply ignoring it. Do you remember that fight you had with Severus, two years ago, right after the winter holidays?"

"The year I stayed at Hogwarts for Christmas."

"Yes. You wrote this very long letter to me about the concept of blood purity and the importance of tradition in wizarding society, good five pages long. I still reference back to it from time to time."

"That was when you and Mum had that big fight, that Petunia had to break up. She thinks that's when the... the affair... happened."

"She's correct," Stephen confirmed. "It was one of our worst Christmases, because I was missing you and trying to compensate for it, and your mother was upset because she felt that I was not only marginalising her, but that I was also condemning her for not being a good mother because she believed that I thought she wasn't missing you enough – I honestly don't know where she'd gotten that idea, that was perhaps the one time where I truly did not in the least understand her – and we fought quite badly in the end, said a lot of things that we shouldn't have, that we didn't really mean. We'd been drinking, so no doubt that had made things worse. Petunia was quite shaken up by it, and I honestly still can't forgive myself for putting her through that. She deserved better from the both of us."

"I remember thinking that something was up; she wrote this very strange letter to me around that time," Lily dredged up the memory of that letter from the depths of her mind. "But when I asked you and Mum, you both said nothing significant had happened, that it was just because she missed me. I knew it had sounded wrong from the start."

"Well, I escaped to my office, spent the evening rereading all of your letters. Jocasta came in to invite me out for a quick dinner, and saw them. She asked me what your favourite subject at Hogwarts was."

Lily straightened up in shock. "Wait, what?"

"No one except witches and wizards writes on parchment anymore; she recognised your letters for what they were, and she connected the dots to the right conclusions."

"Is she a witch? I've not really heard of wizardfolk attending Muggle uni."

Stephen shook his head. "No, she's a Squib."

"Do you know which wizarding family?"

"She goes by Rowley, but she told me her original last name is Rowle, if that means anything to you."

Lily almost blanched. " _Rowle_?! They're... they're not good news, Dad."

Stephen shrugged. "She hasn't had contact with her parents for thirty years, since they finally confirmed that she is a Squib when she was eight. It's a very sore subject for her, but I do know her widowed aunt took her in when she heard her parents were planning to Obliviate her and leave her at a Muggle orphanage. She claims to have gotten lucky in that her aunt insisted that she would make certain Jocasta 'disappeared' into the Muggle world; her belief is that they declared her dead, instead of admitting to her lack of magical ability. Her aunt sent her to a preparatory and then secondary boarding school, and she has been making her own way ever since. She is a writer, and she teaches English in a special needs school."

"That's... wow."

"She's stayed in contact with her aunt, and she still remembers a lot of things from her early childhood, so she was able to give me some perspective on what you are and will be facing in the future. She'd like to meet you eventually."

"Does she... resent me, for being magical?"

"She's bitter about her family and about the social conventions of the wizarding world in general, but she's not the kind who would blame unconnected individuals for it. The last thing she feels about you is resentment."

"And so, after those two weeks, did you even think to put distance between the two of you? You can't be telling me that you didn't think your feelings for her would be in the way of patching things up with Mum."

Stephen's answer was a frown. "Yes, of course I cut contact with her after we broke things off; do you believe that I'd be so callous towards your mother as to continue our communication after the betrayal I'd–"

"Well, she's convinced of it," Lily cut him off with incredulity. "Actually, both she and Petunia seem to be."

"No, Lily," Stephen answered with forceful vehemence. "No, after that December two years ago, I did my best to devote myself to your mother and our marriage properly, and that absolutely included not having _any_ contact with Jocasta whatsoever. Monica is free to not believe me on this – Lord knows she only ever believes what she wishes to anyway – but that's the truth. And for a time right after, I actually hadn't had any doubts about doing it either. For a year or so afterwards, I had truly thought that I was succeeding in repairing our marriage; I even thought I'd managed to force myself out of love with her."

Well, that was obviously the root cause of Monica insisting on that period of things being 'fine' after their rough patch. The timeline was beginning to make a bit more sense to Lily now. Still, Lily frowned and pointed out: "But you said Jocasta was the one who convinced you to get professional help, so you clearly have been in contact with her again for some time. When did things change, and why?"

"That's the problem, Lily; nothing did change," her father answered with a sigh. "You can only force things for so long before the effort exhausts you, and then everything that had been left unresolved comes back to the fore. I tried to make up for my betrayal, I tried as hard as I could to be the husband I had promised to be when she married me, but at one point I realised that I could tear myself apart trying to achieve this and that I would still fail. I cannot fit that mould, and I realised that about the same time that I realised how all this falseness was affecting Petunia. So I began speaking up, began arguing with Monica–"

"And Petunia got even more prickly with the both of you," Lily finished for him, remembering her sister's attitude at the beginning of the summer hols. "I imagine she took Mum's side, too, when she got involved."

Stephen grimaced, which was confirmation enough; it certainly sounded _exactly_ like Lily's older sister to do such a thing.

"I didn't want to make things worse with Petunia, and it felt like that was all I was doing every time I tried to assert myself with Monica in her presence, even if it was specifically in trying to fix things on the issue of magic. At the same time, I couldn't stomach being talked over like my opinion didn't count anymore. I reached a point where I needed someone who would not feel that I was constantly doing wrong by them. I suppose I longed for someone to listen and help me see straight, because I honestly was at the end of my rope. So I wrote Jocasta a letter last fall, after almost two years of silence, and we began corresponding, then talking on the telephone, and that's when she insisted that we needed professional help to fix things. My preference was a therapist, but you know how that ended; by then things had gotten bad enough that apparently Guthrie suggested a priest to your mother, and in all honesty that was not a bad idea, though it hadn't really occurred to me since I'm more or less completely lapsed, but she was resistant to that as well."

"Guthrie Dalloway?" Lily asked, lifting her eyebrows in surprised. "I wasn't aware he had anything to do with all of this."

Stephen grimaced and shrugged in response. "Aside from that one attempt on his part to help, he hasn't really been. Pet and Martine have been extremely close in the last couple of years, so he heard through her. Monica acted mortified that he'd learned of it, quite repudiated his suggestions to me in private."

So apparently Martine Dalloway of all people had known before Lily. Her mood soured thoroughly.

"And the move to Bristol?" she asked pointedly. "Petunia wrote to me about that in April, I think."

"That was after we stopped going to therapy in March; we'd tried it after school had started up again. They were offering me roughly a lateral move, with very little bonus to it compared to Manchester, who were offering me the position of Reader. That's part of the reason why I refused it; the other is that I simply didn't wish to move from northern England, and I'll admit that pettiness played some part in my decision. I think by then I knew Monica and I were over in all the relevant ways. I was stalling because this is Petunia's last summer at home and I didn't think she deserved to have to deal with all of this on top of her move. Once the two of you were gone in September, I would have raised the topic."

"So, you would have blindsided the both of us, then, not just me," Lily noted bitterly. "How equitable of you."

Licking his lips, her father inclined his head in acknowledgment. "I am truly sorry about that, love. In hindsight, I see how selfish and foolish the whole thought process was, but at the time all I really cared about was not..."

"Not spoiling our last summer together," Lily finished when he fell silent, shame-faced. Closing her eyes, she waited herself out a bit, until the first wave of anger had passed. "You know, Dad, you two are as bad as each other," she finally said, opening her eyes to meet his. "Mum with her emotional immaturity, and you with your utter passivity. I deserved better than to be the one to see all that three weeks ago. _Petunia_ deserved better than to witness all of this back and forth you played for the last two and a half years. And I don't... I don't _ever_ want to be like either of you, miserable and unable to admit it to myself, let alone anyone else, and screwing up life for everyone in the vicinity."

Stephen, defeated, only nodded.

"You and your sister deserved for us to put you first, and we didn't, neither of us."

"Yeah. But I forgive you, for my end of things. I was horrible to my friends like that not so long ago, and they forgave me for it, all of them, even Severus, whom I treated the worst. You're trying to fix things, and I appreciate it even if it means... all this. I'd rather you two are divorced and happy than married and miserable, and I get that sometimes, people just stop fitting together and find that there's no will between them to figure out a new way of fitting together again. Merlin knows if I've finally learned something in the last three months, it's that I first, and then everyone else, even my own parents, make horrible, enormous mistakes that hurt people deeply. And I think that if you're willing to make amends and fix things and change so that you never do make such a mistake again, then you deserve another chance. So I'm... I don't want to be angry with either of you two, and I don't want all this stuff that's been between you two to poison my relationship with either you or Mum. So..." nodding to herself, Lily felt the decision fully settle in her bones. "I'm not going to let that happen; I'm making a conscious decision not to let it affect me. But please, promise me that you won't keep things from me in the future; promise me you won't blindside me like this ever again, Dad."

Her father stood up to embrace her, and Lily squeezed back tightly, something deep down inside her unclenching for the first time in more than three weeks.

"I promise, love."

* * *

The very loud commotion from downstairs alerted Sirius to the fact that something was up. Overly alert in a moment, his spine straightened rigidly, he sat cross-legged on his bed and stared at the door with all the wariness that he was capable of, because this was likely going to be falling onto his back _again_ , and this time, he was _not_ going to let his mother ambush him. God, his scalp still itched like a sonofabitch, and he couldn't even scratch at it for the danger of tearing the scabs off. To say nothing, of course, of his hand and arm, which still stung fiercely if he made a wrong move. At least his back and feet had healed enough he wasn't feeling them anymore.

The commotion rapidly cleared up into furious banging of steps on the stairs, and Sirius jumped off the bed in alarm, grabbing hold of his wand though he knew he'd not be doing much with it. He couldn't help himself, like a baby holding onto its plushy toy for comfort.

" _I will have his head for this!_ " Walburga's shrill voice rang out from the staircase.

" _Mother, please wait!_ " Regulus' voice came almost immediately after, rushed and panicked, and it was this, more than Walburga's proclamation, that galvanised Sirius. Jumping over his clothes on the floor, he managed to smack the door into the frame and lock it right as Walburga's head cleared the staircase landing.

His heart beating madly, he eyed the room, searching for any options. Hide in the dresser? No, he'd done that as a child, it was an old enough trick that she'd think of it first. Under the bed? She was liable to turn all the furniture in the room over and crush him in the process. Fight back? He had no clue what had provoked her at all, so he couldn't know what she had in mind for his punishment this time.

But Reggie going after her and trying to stop her, that was what scared Sirius the most. Reggie _never_ involved himself with her punishments, not after she'd decided to mete them out. He played interference beforehand, tried to diffuse situations to more or less success, but he didn't stand in her way once she was on a warpath.

And she was already going to be that much angrier that he'd locked the door on her, he realised the moment she tried the door handle and found that the wood wouldn't budge.

" _Open this bloody door this instant, you monster!_ " she screamed, jerking the door handle so forcefully the whole wall seemed to shake. Sirius took an involuntary step back, then another one, and backed himself into the fucking corner of the room just as a concussive blast knocked the door on the hinges and into the wall with such force that it left a deep hole in the plaster.

Sirius met Walburga's eyes and flinched away, clawing panic squeezing him by the throat. He'd _never_ seen her this enraged, not in his _life_.

"You will pay for this, you will!" she screamed as she advanced, shaking off Regulus when he grabbed for her forearm.

"Mother, please!"

"You stay out of this, Regulus, or else you'll share his fate!"

Sirius met his brother's gaze for a flittering moment, then looked beyond him, and found at least a part of his answer as to what was happening – Bellatrix stood in the hallway, with such chilling look of malicious satisfaction that there couldn't have been a kernel of doubt about the _real_ culprit.

"It wasn't me!" he screamed out, his body trying to move back another step and, banging against the corner of the wall, sliding down, his knees giving up. "I didn't do it, it wasn't me!"

"Liar!" Bellatrix crowed out, almost singing the word. "You're the Muggle-lover in this family, who else but you?"

"What– I don't understand, I don't–"

"Blood on her dress! Why, that's positively out of that Muggle talking photograph thing that's all over London!"

He had no clue what she was talking about, but he didn't need to, he'd gotten the gist from her words alone – Narcissa's dress was ruined, and Bellatrix had set him up for it.

" _I didn't_ – Mother, _please_ , I wouldn't!"

"Mother–" Regulus tried again, and Walburga knocked him back into the wardrobe, then lifted her wand. Sirius cowered into the corner, covering his head with his arms and trying to curl up into as small a ball as was possible.

For the first time since she'd started punishing him by causing him pain, Sirius was utterly terrified for his life.

"I have _had_ it with you! You will _pay_ for this, you little monster! _Crucio_!"

Sirius screamed, the agony of every nerve ending singing in pain at the same moment whitening his vision and _God_ all he could think was _make it stop please make it stop ohgodmakeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstop_ –

Something exploded, and the pain was _gone_ , leaving him to pant heavily, arms and legs shaking without his control, his brain latching onto the first external thing it could, the sharp stench of urine helping him refocus, because this was not over, not even _close_ to over and he had to know, he _had to know what was coming he_ –

The two beds in the room were overtuned against the walls, sheets spilling over broken wood frames. Walburga lay on the floor in a growing puddle of blood, but she was conscious, or near enough, gurgling in pain, some sort of magic still working on her. Regulus sat by the dresser, his shoulder looking painfully wrenched out of its socket but not worse than that. Bellatrix was nowhere in sight.

And there was ominous rumbling of banging and clattering that heralded loud pops of Apparition. By the time Sirius realised that he'd done this, that he still held his wand in his spasming hand and that his magic had risen up to protect him without his conscious control, Orion was already there, pale as a sheet and murderously angry, and one look at him made Sirius drop his wand and whimper in terror, reduced to the thought of _pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease_.

One certainty, above all other, flooded his whole body and mind and soul, until there was no room for anything else–

He was going to die tonight.

* * *

"Regulus, get his wand, now!"

Struggling through the urge to vomit, Regulus tried to scramble to his feet, crying out quietly as excruciating pain shot through his shoulder that was the consequence of hitting the edge of the wardrobe in the blast.

Mother was still wheezing on the floor, and Regulus slipped a bit on her blood – _Merlin, so much blood, blood was everywhere today_ – but grabbed hold of Sirius' wand laying by his curled up body, and the sight of his brother made Regulus want to vomit in its own right, because he'd never seen his brother look so cowed and broken, shaking and trying to fold into as tight a ball as possible, the whites of his eyes more visible than the irises and his robes sticking him to the yellowish puddle he lay in.

 _Merlin_ , what was even going on here, what was–

She'd used the Cruciatus on Sirius, and now she was bleeding on the ground, maybe she was dying, maybe Sirius had killed their mother, and his father looked like he was going to have another heart attack and Regulus didn't know what do to, oh God, how the hell had everything gone so wrong, how...

Father snatched Sirius' wand out of Regulus' limp fingers.

Mother had stopped making those noises and was now limp and insensate on the floor. Standing up, Father conjured a stretcher and levitated her onto it. Regulus registered, ridiculously, that her hair had fallen out of its bun. There was a strand of it, slick with blood, trailing over her forehead.

"Come, they will set your shoulder at St. Mungo's," Father instructed, levitating Mother out of the room before turning to Sirius. "And I will deal with you after," he said in such a quiet, deadly tone of voice that Regulus felt all his hair stand on end and his eyes widen in fear for his brother.

Father cast a complex locking spell on the window, then marched out of the room, calling for Regulus again, and with a hesitant step, Regulus met his brother's eyes one last time, seeing in those grey orbs that Sirius fully understood the situation he was in. Swallowing heavily, Regulus very deliberately moved his gaze away from Sirius to the wardrobe, the leg furthest from the door.

He'd not had to resort to this in four years, and there wasn't an ounce of doubt or insecurity on whether this was the right move or not. He looked back at Sirius, catching the way his brother's eyes snapped away from the wardrobe to meet his again, and knew his brother had understood.

Then he shut the door, let Father lock it with spells Regulus certainly wouldn't know how to counter, and, cradling his misaligned arm close to his chest and gritting his teeth through the pain, allowed his father to Apparate the three of them to St. Mungo's hospital, where it took the healers ten minutes to reset his shoulder, one blinding flash of agony that left him vomiting into a bucket followed by mind-numbing bliss of relief.

Father found him fifteen minutes later to escort him back to the public Floo, informing him that the spell Sirius had used on their mother was some sort of Dark entrails-twisting curse that Father had managed to counteract back at the house, but that required emergency surgery and would be keeping Mother here for at least a day, possibly two. Regulus was to go home and ensure that the family did not get unduly alarmed by what had happened, and that the wedding would proceed without interruption. Regulus, dutiful son that he was, did as he'd been instructed, and then sat himself by the door to Sirius' room, keeping as far away from Bellatrix as he could and thinking all the while that she was lucky he didn't have his wand with him, because in his current state of mind, he was liable to hex her into a very, very painful stay at St. Mungo's right next to Mother.

He was still there when Father arrived back, informed him that the surgery had gone well and that Mother was on the mend, and then removed the spells on the door and entered the room.

The room was devoid of any living beings, and a part of Regulus felt rubbery with relief, even as Father paled in rage. Sirius' things were gone, too, and there was a jagged hole in the wall, on one side of the window starting from the window frame as if someone had melted and vanished brick and mortar, just large enough for a body to squeeze through, a broken chair under the window.

And Regulus' wand lay on the windowsill, a macabre, spiteful calling card letting them know what Sirius had done.

"Is that your wand, Regulus?" Father asked quietly, and Regulus swallowed, then gasped and cringed.

"He... he must have stolen it off me, I didn't even... I didn't even notice, how did I not– Father, I am _so_ sorry, I apologise a thousand times, I didn't... he must have gotten it when he'd dislocated my shoulder, and with Mother and I, I, I–"

"Yes," Father interrupted him, sharp eyes studying his face, and Regulus kept a tight hold on the panic and horror and regret that he'd dredged up, staring into his father's grey eyes for a little bit longer before looking down in shame.

"Forgive me."

Father's hand came to rest gently on his injured shoulder, and Regulus contained a wince.

"There is nothing to forgive; this is your brother's doing, not yours. Why did he leave the wand?"

"I, I don't know, I... I think he must not have been able to use it very well, he stole it off me a few times in the very beginning to try and was always angry afterwards. Father... the wall..."

"The walls are not warded from the inside."

"That's why the broken chair; he tried to break the window first," Regulus murmured, gut clenching and roiling as he imagined the sheer desperation his brother had to have felt, to be throwing furniture at glass he knew had to have been imbued with an unbreakable charm of some kind.

Father's eyes flashing in contempt. "No self-respecting wizard would have resorted to those sorts of Muggle methods, even if he hadn't known it would be futile; stupid boy."

Then the Head of the House Black spun on his heels and swept out of the room, no doubt to chase his wayward firstborn down, leaving Regulus to stand in the epicentre of possibly the biggest bomb their direct family had seen in twenty years and study the room for a long moment, conflicting feelings of relief and anger coursing through him, battling for dominance, two thoughts trying to win one over the other, the sight of his father's pale, sweating face and his mother's expression of pained rictus floating up in his mind to clash with the naked terror and hopelessness that had adorned his brother's face as Regulus had last seen him.

In the end, he stepped to the window and peered out, towards their one old oak playing centrepiece to their back yard and the darkened ground down, down below, and he wondered how Sirius had managed to climb down all the way from three floors up.

Delicately, he took the handle of his wand and rubbed the wood between his fingertips, imagining that he could still feel the warmth of his bother's fingers soaked into it. For a moment, relief won out, and he smiled absently to himself, just the smallest of smiles, there and gone.

Then the relief winked out and dread replaced it, because he knew that the window for any sort of return to normalcy was closing fast, and if it did before Sirius was returned, then Regulus' life was never going to be the same again.

He wished almost desperately for his brother to be standing in this room, because he wasn't sure he could shoulder the burden that was now hanging over his head like a guillotine about to descend. He wished for a brother who was not the disappointment to the family that Sirius was. Most of all, he wished for a brother who cared.

* * *

 **A/N:** Apologies about the longer wait, RL circumstances conspired. I should be regular with updates from here until the end of Part II, since my next trip is only in April.

This is also the last of the big focus on Lily's home life, for those who've perhaps grown a bit tired of the situation. The scene was necessary, of course, given that Lily had run away from the issue for three weeks without resolution, but like the Gryffindor she is, now that she's made up her mind, she won't be agonizing over it very much anymore.


	32. Ch II,28: To Provide Aid

**Chapter 28: To Provide Aid**

Guests at eleven in the evening were not something that was a common occurrence in the Potter household – James' mother was an early riser, which meant that she was usually in bed by ten-thirty, and James' father spent the evening either with her in their bedroom or over his business books in his study. Therefore, when the banging on the door rang out through the house, everyone basically jumped out of their rooms half in fright and half in alarm.

James needed a few moments to pull his slacks on, trying to will his erection away because trying to button anything over it hurt, dammit, and whatever this was, was no doubt an emergency. At least it gave Athenora plenty of time to slip her loose summer robes over her naked skin and run her hands through her dishevelled hair, so it wasn't time completely lost.

He skidded through the hallway and banged down the stairs just in time to see Lonny, the second most senior house-elf in the household, scurry to stand in front of Euphemia's feet, looking anxious and fierce in his obvious defensive posture. James had learned quite well early on that he could get a better read on any given situation from the house-elves than from his parents, and that was the case here, too. Fleamont was standing at the door in a deceptively calm stance, hands crossed over his chest, his wand clutched in his right hand, and he was apparently filling out the doorway more effectively than would have been expected from someone of his stature.

"No, Black, I rather think I will not let you into my home," he was saying as James jumped the last three steps to thunder to a stop. Only Euphemia turned to glance at him out of the corner of her eye, and James' hackles rose, both when he realised that his mother was in her nightgown and a housecoat, and when it registered who was at the door.

"Where is he, Potter?" Orion Black demanded to know, sounding cold and stiff and utterly furious underneath it; James had only ever witnessed that sort of anger once in his life, from Regulus in one of his and Sirius' arguments last year, and the father and son definitely shared that particular trait. A chill went down his spine at the tone, making him instinctively stretch his arm back to shield Athenora from it. He could feel her standing very close to him, on the lowest step in a way that allowed her better visibility of the door than James had. "You _will_ produce him this instant."

"I have no earthly idea what it is you are talking about, Black, but I assure you, even if I were to know, I would not be inclined to indulge your hissy fit," Fleamont retorted dismissively.

"Sirius. I will have him returned to me, or else I will summon the Aurors."

"You've lost your son?" Fleamont asked, voice lilting into mockery. "Why, I cannot say I am surprised. The way you and that wife of yours treat him, I am surprised you've not manage to lose him ten years ago."

"He is not _lost_ , Potter."

"Sirius _ran away_?" James exclaimed, heart suddenly hammering like Hogwarts express in his chest. "What did you do to him?"

"James," Fleamont snapped, and James' teeth clinked painfully with how quickly his mouth shut on him without his conscious thought. "Is that what this is about, Black? Sirius ran away from you?"

Orion Black's nostrils flared, and he exhaled sharply through them, mouth pinched shut.

"He's put his mother into the hospital, he assaulted his own brother, and he fled here, and I will have him back, Potter, or–"

"I would suggest," Fleamont cut him off quietly, though very forcefully, "that you do not finish that sentence with a threat, unless you have any interest in the Ministry looking into your shadier affairs. Especially those connected to Lord Voldemort. Haven't I heard that your niece is affiliated with that man's organisation?"

"The only thing you could ever do to me is levy idle threats, Potter."

"Oh, I can do quite a bit more than that, as you very well know; I may not have my father's interest in the Wizengamot's affairs, but I do have plenty of his connections, on top of my own. As for your son, Sirius is not here."

"I know you are lying, Potter," Black retorted.

"If he were here, I would not tell you, because what you have done to that boy in his sixteen years of life is beyond the pale, and he knows perfectly well that I will protect him as if he were my own, were he to ask it of me. However, as it were, I am, in fact, not lying to you. Sirius is not here."

"He's not stupid; he knows this is the first place you'd look," James pointed out, taking three steps to cross the foyer and stand next to his father, squaring his shoulders and meeting Orion Black's steely grey eyes dead-on.

"If you don't believe me, you are welcome to stay there while Euphemia fire-calls the Auror Office," Fleamont offered. "I'm sure they will be supremely professional and keep to themselves the fact that your eldest child and heir has found life in your house so unbearable he chose to run away from home rather than survive in it for another fortnight."

"It _was_ your suggestion to get them in the first place, after all," James' mother spoke up softly, though her eyes were sharp as they tracked Orion's movement at the door.

The man studied all three of them in silence for several long moments, before straightening his back and lifting his head to glare at James.

"You tell that worthless disappointment of a child that if he does not produce himself in front of me by eight o'clock tomorrow morning, he is dead to me and to this family."

Then, without another word, he spun on his feet and vanished with the crack of Disapparition, allowing the collective ensemble inside the house to breathe sighs of relief.

Only for a moment, though; Sirius was apparently missing from home after something enormous had happened, he was being hunted, and he no doubt had little to nothing of his with him. James prayed he at least had his wand.

"We need to find him, Fleamont; I dread to think what Orion will do to him if he catches him," Euphemia said, face pinched in worry.

"Do you have a way of getting in touch with him, Son?" Fleamont asked James.

"I... there's one, but it's a long shot, Pops," James admitted, mind immediately going to the mirrors. "If he hasn't brought it with him when he fled that house..."

"Try it nonetheless; I'll contact Alastor, see if he could try and track him through the Trace."

"Orion would have thought of that, though," Euphemia pointed out.

"And Sirius wouldn't be stupid enough to use magic that can be Traced, not now he's run off," James reminded them both, wondering as he did about the Animagic and whether that also activated the Trace. It was one of those things they'd never looked into, and he cursed that oversight now.

"Perhaps you might need to go to Albus, then."

"Let's not drag him into this unless we've no other choice; if we pull Dumbledore into it, then this becomes a much bigger issue, and I want to shield Sirius as much as possible from Orion's reach," Fleamont stated decisively. "James, do you think there is any chance that he'd be willing to go back home in case we find him?"

James shook his head almost instinctively. "No, Pops. I've been offering that he come stay with us for the summer since Christmas, and he's been very adamant about making it through this summer and then being free and clear. He knows what it'd mean if he ran away, and if he's still done it, then things must have gotten so bad that he'd be more afraid of going back than being disowned."

"Well, you know him best, dear," Euphemia allowed. "I'll fire-call Alphard; Sirius might have gone to him if he's not come here, and if not, Alphard will be a good source of information as to what in the world has happened in that house today. Lucretia too, perhaps."

They scattered to three sides of the house, Athenora hurrying after James as he ran up the stairs two at a time and sprinted back into his own room.

"What's the way you can contact him?"

"We have hand mirrors that are charmed to allow two-way communication," James explained to her, moving swiftly to tug at the flap on the underside of his trunk's lid that housed one of his most precious, most fragile possessions. Sitting back on his knees, James tugged the mirror out of its slot and tried to peer through it, without any success – past his own reflection, there was only darkness.

"Sirius? Sirius, can you hear me? Siri, where the hell are you?" he called out, feeling the mirror heat up lightly in his hands. "Padfoot, Merlin help me, if you don't answer me I will strangle you when I see you next. Padfoot!"

There was no response, and exhaling with disappointment, James shifted off his shins onto his bum and leaned against his trunk. He was feeling more than a little jittery, adrenaline coursing through his system, because he needed to move, needed to _do_ something, and there was nothing to be done for the moment.

With a sympathetic expression on her face, Athenora joined him on the floor.

"How bad is his home situation?"

"Really bad," James admitted. "His mother's been using Dark curses as punishment for him since at least our first year at Hogwarts; he had nerve damage from the punishments he received over the summer when we all started our second year. He was twelve, and that monster of a woman probably used the fucking Cruciatus on him, because he dared defy the family by joining the Gryffindor House, instead of Slytherin."

"So why hasn't anything been done about it?"

James snorted bitterly. "Why do you think? Because his family is too influential, and with the rise of You-Know-Who, no one dares openly display any opinion that could be considered un-traditional or whatever. My parents offered, more than once, but he always refused any help. He's an idiot for it, but I get that he's got his own reasons, and I respect it, respect his courage to stand against them and to fight for his right. The only reason I could think of for him to have run away is if he... if he was afraid for his life."

"You dumb little boys and your short-sighted ideas about bravery and valour," Athenora said with a shake of her head, making James frown at her.

"What is that sup–"

" _James? Prongs, are you there?_ "

* * *

Padfoot had little concept of how far he'd run; distance felt different to a dog than it did to a human, and the bone-deep terror that was hounding him made everything around him blur and burn in the staccato of rapid heartbeat, the air somehow never being rich enough for a full breath, and the itch that steadily suffused all of his muscles.

He ran, though, because if he didn't run, he would fight, and if he fought, he'd die. The whole thing was as simple as that to Padfoot – fight or flight, and he'd fight if he was cornered, but until then, he'd flee, flee away from the place where things hurt and the world was drab and heavy, flee from the cruelty and the hatred that the word 'family' had come to mean.

And blended into the instincts of a dog was the mind of a young man who knew that there was no going back, not ever, and who didn't care. He'd failed, and he'd be punished and exiled for it, but for the first time in his life, he felt _free_. It was a reckless feeling, one that scorched in his veins, made him feel half-crazed. He was free, and destitute and an orphan, he was homeless and wandless and _free_ , and if he were in his human form, he'd no doubt be laughing like a madman while he ran, but because he was currently a dog, all he could do was howl to the night sky, the stars and the moon.

He knew there was no way for anyone to find him when he was in this form; it felt like it, at least, like nothing in the world could see him when he was a black cujo, a Grimm in the shadows, another creature of darkness in the woods. It was his one chance, and his single-minded focus was on protecting it from anyone who'd wanted to take it away from him.

It was a burning itch in his hip that broke Padfoot's focus on his escape, one that he didn't quite understand at first and so had to stop and gnaw on, to try and relieve it. It was different from the strain in his muscles, and now that he'd stopped he was feeling that too, feeling like his body was so very heavy and cumbersome and _tired_. The burning itch stopped, and Padfoot continued to gnaw on his hip because it felt relieving, it felt relaxing, it felt like if he just continued to do it, then the weight deep inside him wouldn't crush him just yet, would be staved off for just one more moment, one more moment. Sirius had never equated physical pain with relief; for him, pain was only ever equated with his mother's curses, and what helped was expending that hurt, expelling it outside. Padfoot's mind was that of a human, but the dog's instincts were inherent to the form, unavoidable – a reason why Animagic was so damn hard to control and perfect, why so many transfiguration experts never mastered it, getting lost in the animalistic and forgetting the human – and the dog's instincts found relief in the pinch and sting of sharp teeth on tender, heated skin and tingling, aching muscle.

Sirius let it go on, let Padfoot do what he needed to do to make himself feel better, until his mouth flooded with the tangy copper taste of blood, and he realised that he'd really hurt himself. Then he wrested himself away from the animalistic inside this form and forced himself to _stop_ , to take a moment to form coherent thought, _human_ thought...

and the weight of his actions was suddenly pressing him like a stone, so that he couldn't breathe, had to pant and whine, and Padfoot couldn't handle it, couldn't...

and Sirius transformed back to the fore, once more a lost teenaged boy, curled up into a tight little ball and sobbing dryly through heaving breaths, because he _hurt_ , God, everything hurt, every last nerve ending in his body sang with remembered pain, and he was no longer a Black, he was disowned and alone and defenceless, bound by the Trace and a month away from Hogwarts and without his _wand_ , and he was lost in the middle of nowhere, exhausted and his chest hurt and he was cold from the inside out, cold in a way that felt like he'd never be able to get warm again, no matter what came.

Irrationally, he wanted to go _home_. Not Grimmauld place, because that hadn't been home since he'd first seen the magnificence of Hogwarts lit up at night over the Black Lake. But Hogwarts also wasn't home, not really, and he thought crazily that this was why he hated his parents more than anything else in the world, because they'd taken away _home_ from him, whatever that represented.

After a little while, the pain in his hip badgered him out of inky blackness that had enveloped his mind, and he extended his hand down to check over his skin, hissing when his fingers landed on the canine bite marks. Those were nothing much new, really – the last time he'd had to contend with some of those was back in April, when Remus had gotten too close to–

 _Fuck_ _that guy_ , Sirius thought viciously, painfully, and yanked his mind back to the issue of wounds that he had no way of closing up or disinfecting, because not only would using magic get him picked up by the damn Trace, he also didn't have his wand with him so he couldn't even _do_ magic in the first place.

But, tracing the tattered segments of his robes meant that his fingers eventually reached high enough to land on something smooth and hard, and abruptly, the burning itch had a meaning – and the relief that washed through him felt so good he sobbed some more as he pulled the two-way communication mirror out of his pocket and clutched it tightly in his fingers.

"James? Prongs, are you there?" Trying to unsuccessfully stifle a sob, he sniffed. "James, please be there. Please."

" _Siri?! Siri, I'm here, Siri! Where are you, mate? Tell me where you are, Padfoot, and I'm coming to get you._ "

"James," Sirius sobbed once more, then forced himself to swallow it down, to push himself off the ground into sitting position, hissing at the sting of his wounds on his hip. "James, I ran away from that house, I couldn't– couldn't–"

" _I know, Padfoot; we know. Just tell me where you are, please._ "

The near-panic in that lovely voice and in those familiar hazel eyes behind rounded glass lenses felt paradoxically soothing on Sirius' flayed innards, and he took a few deep breaths and tried to concentrate.

"I don't know where I am, I... I ran and ran and I couldn't– I don't know."

" _James, have him show me his location,_ " a pleasantly deep female voice said in an American accent, and Sirius seized up, heart stuttering in his chest.

Someone else knew what had happened to him, someone not James or his parents. He didn't know how to handle it, didn't know what it meant, if he'd be sent back, if–

But no, James would _never_ do that to him, not ever. James was the only person in the world whom Sirius trusted.

" _Padfoot, can you turn the mirror around to something distinctive where you are? Athenora can Apparate us to you._ "

"The Trace, Prongs, what about the– I can't go back, I can't–"

" _You are_ not _going back,_ " James replied, so firmly that it rooted Sirius to the spot, instantly made it easier to breathe. So long as he had James in his corner, he knew he could do anything, get through anything – and he did. In this, he had _always_ had James in his corner.

" _We'll need a map of the country, and I'll need about ten minutes to set the spells up,_ " the girl said. " _Can you hold on for that long, Sirius?_ "

" _What're we doing, then?_ "

" _Positioning wards; I'll mark our location here and orient the map by the magnetic poles. Then I'll Apparate to him and set up the second rune set, and it'll show you on your map where exactly we are, so you can come collect us with the horses. That way his Trace won't be activated on the way back and once he's in a wizarding home, it will be automatically dormant so he'll be safe enough here._ "

"All right."

" _Good; go get me that map, your father's got to have at least one somewhere._ " There was a sound of shuffling footsteps, and then a rather attractive girl showed up in the mirror. " _Sirius, why don't you tell me if you're injured, so I know what of my first aid to bring with._ "

When he did, she asked him about how safe he thought he was where he was, and then other stuff, too, and Sirius only realised when James returned that what she was doing was both keeping his mind occupied from the constant thread of fear and panic running through it as well as building something of a rapport between them, because they were going to have to wait for James to fly to them, and speedy though his horses were, it'd still take them time. Potter Manor was up in Staffordshire, and Sirius had no clue how long he'd been running, but he couldn't have gotten more than a half dozen or so kilometres away from London.

" _Ok, Padfoot, I'm back. Athens will set up the wards now and then she's coming, and I'll take the map and head south. We'll get you home and comfortable, all right? And Athens is really great company, I know you'll get along like a house on fire._ "

"Sure thing, Prongs."

The girl did need some five minutes to do her thing, and James nattered on and on about something or other that Sirius paid only marginal attention to, because just hearing James' voice constantly droning at him was enough, and Sirius preferred to let it wash over him and calm his baser flight urges some more. When they were ready, Sirius, swallowing past the lump in his throat, turned the mirror around to a rather ugly dead tree in the vicinity and kept it pointed there until he heard something from the other side.

" _Ok, I've got enough detail,_ " the girl said. " _Move half a mile or so from that place, that should be distant enough that the Trace won't pick me up arriving and spelling; I'll give you a couple of minutes. James'll keep hold of the mirror, so we can all be in touch with each other._ "

"Fine."

" _It's just a bit longer, mate, then this whole horrible day will be behind you and everything will turn out for the better, I'll make sure of it."_

In the end, Sirius stayed far enough away from the dead tree that he didn't even hear the pop of Apparition. Only when a distantly raised voice called out his name did he move back to the same spot, and there was that girl sitting on a fallen log, looking at him with appraising blue eyes, a small square purse on her lap.

"Sirius, I presume," she said once he'd drawn close enough to her, and yeah, she was more than a little hot, dressed in summer robes that did rather nice things to her figure. He eyed her warily. "Athenora Adelmann. I've got my first-aid kit with me. It's No-Maj, but it does quite well in a pinch, I've found. Would you rather tend to your wounds yourself, or let me do it?"

"I'll do it myself," he told her, waiting until she'd put the purse on the floor before picking it up, making sure to keep an eye on her the whole time. The purse had one of those zip-thingies Muggles used on their clothes and bags, and when Sirius opened it, the whole thing felt just a bit overwhelming; he had no clue what any of the things inside it were used for.

Athenora walked him through it, staying out of reach and speaking in a voice that was utterly void of any sort of pity or awkwardness. In fact, she seemed to like making all sorts of insinuations as jokes, and Sirius found that he was relaxing just a bit, in spite of himself. He still didn't trust her, but she seemed like she knew exactly how to behave so as not to upset him. Once he'd cleaned and taped the worst of the wounds on his hip, she took over the conversation, giving him information about herself and what she and James had been up to over the summer. Sirius listened, and by the end he'd even asked a question or two, though he couldn't make himself do more than that.

It turned out to take over an hour for James to arrive, or maybe more – it certainly seemed like a hundred years. But when James jumped off his Granian, throwing Athenora the reins to both him and the smaller Aethonan on his way towards where Sirius was trying to stand up without jarring his injuries too much, the runaway teen found that he'd have been willing to wait days more, just so long as James was there to lean on. The bespectacled boy got there first and dropped to his knees, pushing Sirius gently back into seated position so that he could check him for injuries, and the moment he was close enough to hug, the tightly coiled misery and inky, slimy blackness lifted enough from Sirius' mind to make him unwind.

"What has she done to you, Padfoot?" James asked, eyes wide as they studied his shorn head and the nail-less fingers of Sirius' right hand, the deep, scabbed scratches of the letter he'd written on his forearm. At least he couldn't see the healing welts on his back, or his damaged feet.

"Nothing a bit of magic won't fix," he joked weakly, reaching for any false bravado he could find, because he hadn't enough of the real thing to just say 'frightened me to death so much I pissed myself and tortured me with the most painful curse in existence – my own _mother_ '; not too much use for putting up any sort of a front, he knew he must've looked like shit, not to mention reeked of urine and blood and who knew what else, but appearances were all that he had left, really, and he didn't want James to worry too much.

"And this?" James asked quietly when he reached the wounds on Sirius' hip.

"Nah, that was me," Sirius admitted very, very quietly. "I forgot that I had the mirror with me, so when you called – you called, didn't you? – it itched."

James understood the message loud and clear.

"Will you be able to sit astride Fiend?"

"Yes," he said firmly, because he was going to do it even if they had to tie him over the horse's back to keep him stable. "Apparently I'm pants at Muggle wound treatment, but your bird said it would do, and I suppose she's got more experience than the two of us do. Did you know they call Muggles 'No-Maj' in the States? I didn't know that."

Huffing in amusement, James stood up, then bent to help Sirius to his feet. "Come on, up you get; Mummy and Pops are more than a little worried, it was all I could do to convince them this was a good plan in the first place."

"It's an excellent plan. Athens, don't you agree this was an excellent plan?"

From her position by the horses, Athenora smirked.

"I might have told him to take some painkillers; I'm assuming he's usually not this talkative?"

"Oh, he is, just..."

And yeah, now that she mentioned it, Sirius did feel a bit off, though he thought that was because he was having a hit of some rather lovely, undiluted relief, not because of some Muggle pills. And besides, his mind was still too jittery and dark, and he knew his bravado façade was shaky, so what if he was exaggerating a bit? It felt almost desperately good to pretend for a moment that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, that he'd not just turned his back on his whole life.

"Athens is quite an expert on all this, did you know, Prongs? How could you keep her hidden from me? I'da visited way sooner if that were the case."

Athenora released a short, amused laugh.

"I'm sure we can find a way to get to know each other, Sirius; can't we, James?"

They exchanged looks that made James turn an even stronger shade of red, which made Sirius almost blink in surprise, because he couldn't quite remember a girl ever making his best friend blush, not even that Ravenclaw he'd lost his cherry to. Not even Evans, come to think of it.

They got Sirius up on the Granian, and James swung himself up behind him, because there was no way that Sirius could ride the Aethonan all the way back and he sure as hell didn't feel safe enough having Athenora at his back, no matter that he'd decided he liked her. But James' sturdy athletic form was a safety wall and his arms holding the reins felt grounding rather than constraining, and Sirius decided that he was rather too exhausted to worry about anything else but keeping his balance and not jarring his various hurts too much.

"How badly off are you really, Padfoot?" James asked quietly while they waited for Athenora to adjust her saddle, with so much concern it made Sirius bite his lip to stop himself from falling completely apart. He took a few deep breaths and tried to put himself forcibly back into some semblance of presentability, because if nothing else, he knew he was safe now, and no matter what came tomorrow, he was not going to spend the night alone and lost in the middle of fucking nowhere.

"I'll muddle through, Prongs; don't I always?"

"Your father came to our place," James told him quietly. "Insisted that you had to be there, demanded to be let in. Pops sent him packing, then had us all looking for you. Just so you know – both Mummy and Pops want you with us."

Sirius swallowed with difficulty, the knot in his throat feeling constricting and suffocating, and for the first time since this whole mess began, his eyes began filling with tears.

"Did you manage to get anything other than the mirror with you?"

Grateful that James knew him well enough not to demand a verbal answer to his statement, Sirius nodded.

"I, uh," he began, then stopped to clear his throat a few times, until he felt capable of proper speech, "Orion took my wand, and Reggie dropped his in the commotion, so I borrowed it to pack as much stuff as I could and shrink it down, stuffed it all in my pockets. I don't have any money, though."

"Forget the money, Padfoot! You don't have a fucking wand!"

"Suppose I'll have to get a new one," Sirius replied flippantly, heart fluttering madly in his chest.

"You're getting everything you need, Sirius," James said firmly, just as Athenora said: "Ok, we can go," and without ceremony spurred the horse into the sky, James following suit.

The ride was uncomfortable and long and cold in spite of the heat of the summer, but it passed more quickly than Sirius thought anything in his life had. Maybe he'd dozed off a bit, even, though that had to have been those bloody Muggle pills. They did good work, though, because his body ached but didn't hurt nearly as badly as it had before taking them, and in the end the flight passed uneventfully, which was its own kind of relief.

When they landed in the yard, he was again helped down from the horse, and led directly to the sitting room. And when Euphemia Potter wrapped her arms around him and guided his head to her shoulder, Sirius found himself weeping, because in the embrace of the woman who had been more a mother to him than the woman who'd actually birthed him, he finally felt safe enough to truly fall apart the way that he needed to.

* * *

The night always fell late in the evening in the summer. Peter noted it almost idly as he loitered in the shadowed alleyways of the seedy part of London. He never felt comfortable here, but it was familiar ground, and so he didn't feel uncomfortable, either. His mother had brought him here when he'd been ten years old, before he'd started Hogwarts, whenever she'd not had the money to leave him with a minder and Enid couldn't take him for the evening. She'd still been secretive about her escalating addiction back then, at least when it came to her sister-in-law. Peter didn't really remember if she'd ever tried to hide it from him; if she had, then it had to have been when he'd been so little as to have forgotten it.

Enid and Peter had gotten a promise from Lauris – for what it was worth – that she'd keep away from these sorts of places and only go to Jared for her resupply. But Peter had made no such promise to either woman, and last year, he'd spent most of his summer skulking about these parts of town, at the same time oddly attracted and genuinely disgusted by the way people existed in these places, the drug dens and squat houses, people that society had forgotten and rejected, people like Enid and Lauris, who had nowhere else to go or weren't capable of making it on their own. It was always a peculiar feeling, to be sure, tingling under his skin in ways that were familiar and yet not. Peter felt like that sometimes at school, too, when James and Sirius pulled a prank on the unsuspecting populace of Hogwarts, or went after Snape and the other wannabe Death Eaters. It left him electrified a bit, antsy, and he still couldn't quite figure out if he liked it or not.

He had spent days poring through books on human transfiguration, searching for any mention of Animagic in conjunction with the Trace, and yet, he'd not been able to find exactly what he'd been looking for. He'd asked Remus for help in the end, and getting a response from his friend, and a friendly and warm, if somewhat stilted and limited letter, at that, had given him hope that what had happened in June between the four of them wouldn't have to mean that Peter had lost the friendship of the boy who was genuinely the nicest person to him outside of his family.

Remus had said that from his initial heavy research into Animagic, his best conclusion was that this branch of magic was an internal magical process, on level with Occlumency, a Mind Art focusing on building mental resistance to mind-altering magic. What that meant, according to Remus, was that no magic was expelled externally, but rather that the magic was used internally within the body. As the Trace registered magical discharge in a certain radius of the carrier (which was why Lauris couldn't perform any magic in their flat while Peter was there), Remus' educated guess was that the Trace wouldn't actually pick up the human-to-animal self-transfiguration, though he of course couldn't be sure.

But Diagon Alley was too far from those parts of London where Peter needed to walk as Wormtail, and the money had only gotten tighter in the days following Enid's treatment. So Peter had in the end decided it was worth the risk, given Remus' opinion, because Remus usually knew these things better than anyone else Peter knew, and had transformed in a place where his magic couldn't be masked.

It had taken Peter until the following day to breathe a sigh of relief. Remus turned out to be right on this point, as Peter had hoped – the Trace couldn't pick up his transformation, and that made his plan far simpler. He spent several of the unbearably hot days of the summer getting reacquainted with the seedy, drug-infested sections of London, learning their smells and tastes and sights from the perception of a rodent, finding the hollows in the walls, the grates through which he could wiggle, the holes and nooks and crannies that could hold his compact murine body. There was so much more to discover anew, so many things to explore and experience, a whole world opening up before him to be used.

And the pudgy boy knew exactly how to use it to the fullest – which was why he was there now, in the form of Wormtail, sneaking into a run-down building where, in one of the abandoned apartments, one could procure what Peter had managed to learn was pretty decent heroin for some unreasonably high prices.

As a rat, Peter always found it quite easy to maintain his higher mental functions. He knew Sirius at least struggled with it, and Peter had seen him more than once lose himself to a canine instinct before someone or something brought his attention to it. There was the fear, of course, always the fear of large threats, but Peter had always lived with some form of fear or another, and controlling it had been crucial for spending one night a month in the company of a feral werewolf. So in spite of the sounds and smells of the drug den he'd snuck into, in spite of the danger of what he was about to do, Peter barely had to contain his overwhelming urge to get out of that place, to the fresh air and dusky smell of London smog.

He found his way through the walls and beneath floorboards, past the insensate drug addicts and watchful criminals of this hidden world of Muggle London, until he reached the rooms where the drugs were sold, and the little stash of small bags filled with the potent white powder. Then he scurried under a rather filthy-smelling sofa and bode his time in tense watchfulness.

He knew what he needed to do, and how complicated it was to pull off. This wasn't the first time he was doing it – it wasn't even the second or third time, and by now he knew exactly what the risks were and how to minimise them. If the drugs were in the bags rather than capsules, like now, then the risk rose, because he couldn't simply pick one up with his teeth, not when rat teeth were sharp enough to poke holes through them without even trying. It meant he'd need to transform at least a part of his body, a process that he'd always found harder than transforming his whole self. Not getting pinned down as a rat was another important thing, since he didn't know how to Apparate yet. Then again, these were Muggles he was dealing with; so long as they didn't see something their limited minds couldn't explain (such as a rat with a human hand), then they were not very likely to think that a _rat_ of all things helped himself to their drugs.

The opportunity presented itself sooner than Peter had hoped; once the flat had cleared of the buyers, the two drug dealers moved away from their stash, one going into the narrow little kitchen while the other dropped himself right on top of Peter, the springs in the sofa creaking ominously. Flaring his nostrils in contempt, Peter eyed the kitchen doorway and, determining the guy in there was making coffee for himself and would thus be occupied for a few minutes, scuttled to the little bag in the corner as quietly as he could. Then, concentrating as hard as he could, he let his magic flow into his paw to elongate his fingers and retract the hair, to shorten the nails and shift the palm pads into smooth skin. The hardest part was making his hand bigger, because it meant he also needed to shift part of his arm to support the added weight – he'd always been truly horrible at these parts of Animagus training, but Remus' guidance and patient instruction had gotten him through it, and this was only working backwards, flipping things on their end, going from-small-to-big instead of the other way around, and he'd figured it out quickly enough, because he'd always had a very good memory for things he understood intimately, and he may have been bad at conventional learning methods, memorisation and rote repetition, but when it was things he _used_... well, Peter knew the value of certain skills, and he could be more than a little determined to master them, when they mattered.

And this _mattered._

In the end, it was easy enough to grab hold of a heroin baggie and shift his hand back, the bag shifting with it. Slipping out of the room was also easy, when the building was so run-down. He had to hobble some, because breaking the bag was not an option, but as soon as he found an empty room, he shifted into human form for long enough to store the heroin safely in his pocket before shifting back into a rat and slipping out into the street.

Walking back towards the bus stop and home, Peter smiled to himself with more than a little satisfaction. So maybe he _was_ as stupid and incompetent in all the ways that James and Sirius thought he was. Ensuring that his aunt had enough money for all the treatments and healing she required, getting his mother the drugs she needed, bringing her back from a binge into the addiction levels she could handle and maintain long-term, and on top of that not paying a pence into the pockets of criminals who enabled that same addiction – oh, he was more than capable of all of that. He could almost bet that his friends would look at him differently if they knew all of this, would think better of him, and that thought, at least (because he was _never_ going to share this with them, not ever) buoyed him up.

It felt good to think that at least in _something_ , they were wrong about him – in those things that mattered, Peter could rise to the challenge.

* * *

Remus met Lily at the Lucky Cauldron, where she arrived holding her father's hand in order to get him through the various wards protecting the location from Muggles, much like Remus had had to do with his own mum to get them here from Wales through the Floo. Professor Evans looked depleted after almost a month, definitely having lost weight and appearing tired, but there was also pure enjoyment in him that Remus had seen when the pair had first picked him up, the ease of their relationship that Remus had glimpsed only when neither Petunia nor Mrs Evans had been there. He was glad for what it meant, and felt himself minutely relax, though his heart skipped a beat and his stomach fluttered in light nerves when Lily's green eyes met his and she smiled.

"We're not late, are we?" she asked after giving him a mildly exuberant hug.

"No, we only arrived a couple of minute ago by Floo," Remus confirmed. "Lily, Mr Evans, this is my mother; Ma, these are Lily and her father."

"Stephen, pleasure to meet you."

"Hope, and likewise. I've heard so much good about your daughter, Stephen; she's really something."

Lily blushed prettily and accepted a hug from Hope.

"It's so nice to meet you in person, Mrs Lupin."

"You as well, dear. Now, then," she declared, clapping her hands gaily together, "do we have a plan of attack, or are we wandering?"

On the whole, it was a fascinating outing. Stephen and Hope got along together like a house on fire, both excited about studying the magical world. Hope had far more experience, of course, having been married to a wizard for almost two decades, but she'd never lost her awe of magic, and it was clear enough they fed each other's exuberance like a couple of Muggle-borns on their very first trip to Diagon Alley instead of the grown adults in their fourth or fifth decade of life. Remus and Lily kept a constant stream of comments and explanations, more often than not going into unnecessary detail just because they felt like it, enjoying the rather fun reversal in roles to the usual visit.

"Did McGonagall reply to your letter?" Remus asked Lily once they'd entered the bookstore and were collecting the textbooks on the list for N.E.W.T. classes they were planning to take.

"She wrote back that she needs to discuss it with Dumbledore some more, but that she herself is willing to make an exception," Lily answered with a wide grin on her face that made Remus' mouth twitch in response. "I'm getting the book either way, because if I don't get in, you'll be tutoring me for the next two years."

"Didn't think you'd do anything else. My Transfiguration and DADA for your Charms and Potions?"

"But of course, good sir."

"Pleasure doing business with you, milady."

They sniggered together over that bit of silliness as they collected the books they were going to need and found their respective parents, who were in the fiction section of _Flourish and Blotts_.

"Oh, the Norville Flosslax books! I completely forgot I said I'd read them this summer."

"Which books, love?"

"Germaine Lassiter? He's excellent," Remus' mother agreed, moving swiftly to the correct shelf and pulling out the four published novels in order to hand them over to the Evanses. "Crime stories, have a very well done noir feel to them, hard-boiled. The first one is a bit on the young adult side, but it's an origin story so it's to be expected."

"They're unusual because the main characters are from one House each and they actually don't portray any of the houses negatively, which tends to happen depending on which house the author belonged to – Gryffindor alumni usually have Slytherins be the bad guys, and Slytherin alumni usually make Gryffindors be the incompetent idiots."

Lily stacked the four books on top of all the other ones she was carrying in her arms already, declaring almost dramatically all the while: "Dad, I'm gonna buy the whole lot, and then you can read them and I'll just borrow them from the library when we get back to Hogwarts."

"As you like it, Lilyflower."

It made the father and daughter exchange some sort of secret look, so Remus assumed it was an inside joke between them.

"That's a lovely nickname," Hope commented as they carried things to the register to pay.

"Lils is the one all my friends use," the girl explained, "except Clotilde, she calls me Lis, as in the _fleur-de-lis_ – she's half-French. Lilyflower is from when I was little, and when she's feeling very charitable, my sister calls me Lilian. When she's not, she calls me Liliput, because she knows how much I detest that book. Gave me nightmares when I was a kid."

"Which book?" Remus had to ask, not familiar with the term.

" _Gulliver's Travels_ , by Jonathan Swift," Remus' mum filled him in. "It's 18th century satire on the traveller's tales type of novels. It is perhaps a bit on the too-fantastical side."

"Says your mother while standing in the Wizarding Britain's commerce centre," Stephen pointed out with a note of playfulness in his voice that made Hope giggle just a bit.

"It's horrid," Lily declared emphatically. "Lilliput is the first country he goes to, and Lilliputians are very tiny, detestable people who end up trying to gouge his eyes out under guise of their law. I read it pretty soon after I'd met Severus and learned about magic, so I kept dreaming that they'd be walking all over me and doing those things to me and I was terrified that they actually existed in the magical world."

"So that's where the nickname comes from," Remus murmured, feeling bad for Lily and finding in this yet another reason to dislike her elder sister – Petunia had really done almost nothing that had left a positive impression on him.

"For such a short name, you certainly do have plenty of nicknames," Hope noted, turning the topic around to a more positive perspective. "I'm afraid neither mine nor Remus' names lend themselves very well to alternate forms; Remmy is about the only nickname he's ever had; right, dear?"

Remus found himself blushing hotly in embarrassment, but he did nod his head.

"And Moony," Lily reminded him. "I've heard them call you 'Moony'. I bet it was Sirius who came up with it, isn't it? He likes to go with the nasty ones – Moony, Wormtail, Snivellus. Well, unless you're James, though I'm not sure what 'Prongs' is supposed to mean."

"Moony?" Remus' mum asked, voice pitching in a way that made Remus wince; he'd neglected to share that little gem with his mum this year, because he'd known she'd be furious on his behalf, even if Remus himself had barely put up any real fight when Sirius had declared that his official Marauder nickname. Really, compared to poor Peter, he'd gotten off rather easy, he'd thought. "Oh, those boys! The more I hear of this mess, the gladder I am that you are now friends with Lily instead of them."

"Ma!"

"You know I'm right."

Thankfully, rather than ask more about it, Lily's dad instead focused on something else in that sentence. "Am I correct to assume that 'Snivellus' refers to poor Severus? And 'Wormtail'?"

"That's for the fourth member of their group, Peter. For all his faults, he doesn't deserve that."

"Peter doesn't deserve a lot of things he's gotten from them," Remus found himself agreeing with her, though it made his stomach unsettled to speak that way. It was one of those truths that never really got acknowledged in their group, just like the real dangers that Remus posed during the full moon, Sirius' venting of familial issues on all Slytherins, and James' overblown sense of entitlement he'd gotten from his overly doting parents.

"Are those the boys that you made excrete slugs and bats?"

Lily sniggered and Remus snorted, both confirming it at the same time through their little fits, prompting Hope to pat Lily on the shoulder and say: "Good for you, dear; though I don't condone any kind of violence as a matter of course, given how atrociously those boys seem to have been raised, I imagine they could do with someone putting them in their proper places," which made Lily blush and smile warmly at Remus' mum, and in turn made Remus' chest feel warm and fluttery.

And yeah, all right, his ma had been right about that, he acknowledged to himself – perhaps he did fancy Lily to an extent; well, certainly more than any of the girls Sirius had tried to set him up with. He still wasn't sure what to do about it, though.

They finished their mandatory shopping, conversation flowing easily enough in similar vein, after which Remus escorted his mum back home through the Floo with his things while Lily said goodbye to her father, who took her purchases to their car. The two teens met up back at the Leaky Cauldron five minutes after, finding a table near the window but a bit out of the way, where they made themselves comfortable and had lunch.

They talked mostly about the last month in more depth, now that their impromptu chaperones were no longer present. Remus was glad to hear that Lily had mostly come to terms with the events of the summer and a part of him was surprised to note that she sounded more mature in general than she had back in April when they'd first started hanging out properly. It rang out harmonically with the feeling that he had about his own growth and maturation, especially when he remembered just how pathetic he'd felt only a couple of months ago – distance from James, Sirius and Peter had given him a better perspective on himself, and getting to know Lily and Snape had served to prove to him just how narrow-minded his views were of the world. It was a lesson he knew he'd carry with him for a long time to come, and it left him wondering how much that change was going to be noticeable to him when he was finally confronted with the other three Gryffindor sixth-years in ten days.

Neither of them were much in the mood to stay in Diagon Alley, but the other side of that coin was that the heat that had been slow-cooking the country for months had still not abated. Remus hadn't felt too much of it, given that his was a magical residence and thus could be easily cooled with some long-term charms (and of the two weeks he'd spent with Lily, one had been right next to a large body of water in which he'd been able to cool down every half an hour or so), but he wasn't all that enthusiastic about walking around asphalted London on a busy Saturday. They compromised by agreeing to do some window shopping of the many bookstores on Charing Cross Road, since that was right outside the door to the Leaky Cauldron. Remus ended up actually buying a discounted copy of _Gulliver's Travels_ , the look that earned him leaving him with a peculiar sensation of wanting to both laugh himself silly and also cower in a corner from guilt.

They nonetheless retreated to the magical district sooner than planned, the afternoon sun beating harshly on their heads. Ice cream was again in store for the outing, it seemed, and this time they actually took a small outdoors table under the awning and people-watched a bit, waving at familiar faces and commenting about a particularly outrageous fashion choice. Given that it was the second to last weekend before the beginning of school, there were more than a few people dressed in the usual Muggle apparel, which gave the street a rather colourful flare.

"I think I'd like working here," Lily noted thoughtfully, pink tongue flicking out to trace the path of the little white rivulet of ice cream over the cone, and Remus suddenly felt his stomach clench and heat pool rather too south. "Get to meet new people all the time, have the liveliness in the background."

"Too crowded for me," he answered with a smile, eyes firmly on the crowd, resisting the temptation to watch Lily eat her ice cream.

"How come there isn't a place where you could go during that time of the month?"

"What, like a hospital?"

"No, like... a reserve. Oh, don't make that face, you know that's not how I meant it," Lily said with a roll of her eyes and a smile that took the sting out of her initial comment. "I mean, what's the British population, thousand? Two thousand? That's not small. What do they all do during that night, wander randomly in the woods and hope they don't run into campers?"

Remus found himself exhaling heavily, wondering how she'd managed to stumble onto a topic that was sure to ruin the mood. "They tend to run in packs. A very large number of them are on You-Know-Who's side," he told her quietly, leaning on the table so as not to be overheard and catching a whiff of her favoured perfume as she did the same. Flowery, mild and refreshing in the heat. "They'd not want Ministry's help even if the Ministry were open to helping them. Sirius loves to blame You-Know-Who's supporters for how the Ministry treats all of us, but it's the other way around, mostly."

"So, what, they'd rather risk even _more_ people being turned than make life easier for everyone?" Lily was absolutely outraged.

"What's a few Muggle corpses to Obliviate out of existence?" Remus noted bitterly. "Wizardfolk know to keep away from deserted places during that time of the month."

The plop and burst of a half-melted ice cream scoop made them both startle, and Remus stared, a bit dumbfounded, at the way Lily's cone was completely mangled in her white-knuckled fist resting on the table. She looked utterly _furious_ , not even aware of the fact that some of her scoop had splattered onto her shirt. Wincing, Remus put down his cup and pulled out a couple of serviettes out of the holder, scooting his metal chair out of the way far too loudly as he stepped around their table to take her clenched fist gently in both of his and pry it open to wipe her sticky fingers. Lily let him, her green eyes blazing.

" _A few Muggle corpses_ ," she muttered, low and hissing, though she was pliant enough as Remus crouched down to her side so that he could dab with a clean serviette at the stains on her shirt, feeling his neck and ears burn at the fact that some of those were close enough to the swell of her breasts he could tell that her brassiere had lace.

"I know how you feel," he told her quietly, squeezing her fingers to make her refocus on him instead, and also to hide that his were shaking, just a bit, from the adrenaline and the arousal and the bone-deep terror that this topic always brought up in him.

"God, how can... how can people be so goddamned uncaring, Remus?" she asked, breathing a bit more heavily in her anger. "It's like no one who isn't them isn't even _human_. Muggles, werewolves, vampires, Squibs, mentally ill – it's like magic is a seal of proof that they're the only ones who have a right to _exist_ , and even that's not enough for them, they then go and limit it to those who've been able to boast about it for generations and who are in their narrow minds 'whole'. God, I _hate_ the magical world, I really do."

"No, you don't," Remus corrected her compassionately, "you just hate injustice, and there's as much of it in the Muggle world as there is here, you said so yourself. It's people, not just wizardfolk."

"I know," she whispered, and the fingers gripping his unclenched slowly. "It's not like I've ever been exempt from doing the same thing. But I at least did it because I was blind to what I was doing, not because I believed it."

"And I think a lot of other witches and wizards are like you. It's easy when it doesn't concern you; if you weren't friends with me, would you care this much about how werewolves are treated? Or if you weren't Muggle-born, would you be as outraged about a few Muggle deaths? And, you know, a lot of them are scared, too, of You-Know-Who and the power that Pure-bloods have in the Ministry."

"So we _make_ them care, we _make_ them realise that cowering is not the way," Lily declared fervently, staring into Remus' eyes with frightening, heart-stopping intent that made him breathe heavier. Like this, she was above him, looming just a touch, and the werewolf boy found it wonderfully dizzying to have to crane his neck in order to meet her eyes. "The whole bloody world managed to do it thirty years ago; we can do it now too."

"Yeah," Remus breathed out, barely even aware of what it was that he was agreeing to, but finding not a fibre of himself that doubted. He cleared his throat, nodded, tried to clear the fog out of his mind. "Yes, I agree."

"Good," Lily said firmly, a fierce expression on her face, and that was the moment, Remus could feel it in his blood and down to the very lupine core of himself – this was _the_ moment, the moment to make his move, to lift his hand and cup her cheek and pull her down and kiss her with all the fire and adrenaline that was burning in what little space there was left between them, and it felt like time had slowed down to a crawl, the way he saw his hand rise towards her face. It stretched forever, that moment, longer than any he could remember in his life, certainly long enough for him to comprehend what he was about to do.

He let the moment pass.

It was surprisingly easy to do, in the end, to redirect his hand from her face to the juncture of her neck and shoulder, to place it there and squeeze reassuringly, a promise stronger than most he'd made in his life. He let the moment pass, and he felt almost shockingly calm, almost relieved, in spite of the air that was charged with potential and tension, the low rumble of the wolf protesting his decision through the sleep of the new moon. And most of all, he didn't regret it, not when he did it and not in the seconds afterwards, when Lily squeezed his fingers in acknowledgement and nodded, looking utterly oblivious to everything that had been going through Remus' mind.

Remus rose to his feet, knees and leg muscles aching from the strain of crouching for so long, and Lily looked down at the mess on the table with a grimace that made him smile, because it was an adorable sight. Remus supposed this was what love felt like when it was directed towards someone who wasn't family, and he embraced it, because Lily had in a few short months become the second most important person to him, next to his mother, and Remus did not need anything more to be content in their relationship. The crush was going to fade, of that he was certain; the love he felt for her was not romantic, or at least not yet, and now that he'd denied it, he was confident it wouldn't become anyway. That was their moment, that Remus had let go unfulfilled deliberately, and something was telling him there wouldn't be any others coming in the future.

That was all right; he didn't think Lily had ever considered him the way that he'd considered her, which made the chance of things being awkward between them afterwards too high. He'd thought of James, Sirius and Peter as his best friends for so many years, and yet only befriending Lily had truly shown him what having a best friend was like, and he wanted to keep that, to have it in the years and months to come. He wanted _Lily_ as his best friend, and he wasn't idiot enough to think that a girlfriend and a best friend could ever be the same thing. Between those two things, he was choosing the safe option, but for the boy who'd been betrayed by those whom he'd trusted to make him feel safe in the first place, the safe option was the one that felt right.

And it felt good, too, to know that he'd not done it for anyone but himself and her – James had warned him off pursuing Lily romantically way back when, and Remus didn't give a fig about what that spoiled brat of a hormonal, horny teenager might have thought; he'd not done it for Snape either, as Remus had not owed him anything, when the boy had had so many chances already. But it was a bad time for Lily, no matter whether or not it was the only possible time for the two of them, and Remus didn't want to add to her already full plate, what with her family falling apart and whatever it was that she and Snape were cooking up for the coming year.

It was the right thing to do, he could feel it. Whether or not he'd come to regret it in the future, Remus didn't feel much like speculating; right now, he didn't, and that was more than enough.

They parted ways soon after that, Lily looking at Remus in a way that made him stand up straight and tall, like he'd promised her the world instead of just his help in fighting the fights she felt she needed to, and the near future looked bright and positive and full of promise in a way he didn't remember it ever did, not even the thought of having to face his former friends in ten-day's time able to bring him down, not when it also meant he'd get to see Lily again, too.

* * *

 **A/N:** Marauder-heavy chapter, I know, but necessary for the development of these characters. And also, a resolution to an extent on the matter of Lily/Remus. Next couple of chapters will have plenty of Lily/Severus interactions again, for those who've been waiting for the focus to shift back to the main mains. Thanks for bearing with me.


	33. Ch II,29: To Expose Fault Lines

**A/N:** A slight warning for references to a sexual situation in James' section that might not sit too well with everyone (no explicit language, of course, and not description of it either, beyond enough reference to infer what had occurred, I'm still sticking to the T rating). Just keep in mind that this is emotionally-repressed teenagers we're talking about here, with a healthy sexual appetite for their age and opportunity on offer.

* * *

 **Chapter 29: To Expose Fault Lines**

The room smelled in a way that James found himself disliking quite a bit, but opening the windows was out of the question, because the heat outside was stifling still, and not even magic could compete with the natural air flow, not enough that they'd not get uncomfortable if his goal was to air out the room. Which meant that he had to suffer the stench.

"What _is_ it?" Sirius asked from the bed, eyeing Athenora's lit cigarette with lazy, thoughtful eyes. He looked better, now that James could see all of his skin; Euphemia had finished off the healing, and with his hair and nails back to their normal length, he looked mostly like his old self.

He wasn't, but James didn't think it'd be too noticeable to those who didn't know him well. There was a skittishness to him that he couldn't hide, and desperation to present himself as unaffected by what had happened. But this morning, Sirius had gone to speak with Alphard Black, the uncle who was possibly the only person in that family to actually love him, and when he'd come back, he'd been so bloody broken that James hadn't quite known what to do with him.

 _Burned off the tapestry. That's me done with that lot, I suppose._

Disowned. As promised. And much as James wanted to think 'good riddance', he couldn't, because no matter what they'd done to him, they'd still been Sirius' family, and now he had no one.

Well, no one but the Potters. If he wasn't turning seventeen in a couple of months, James knew his parents would have adopted him officially without qualm. Sirius Potter. Wouldn't that have been a riot?

Athenora had in the end taken the both of them in hand, and had made them all forget the mess that was Sirius' home life. And bugger him if James had ever thought he'd find himself in such a position, and especially with Sirius of all people, because _no_ , no, threesomes were all right if they were with two women, maybe (though he'd never been quite sure how that would work exactly), but with another bloke, and him James' best friend, James' _brother_... The wrongness of the thought would have felt utterly insurmountable.

Except that in that moment, James would have done whatever it took to pull Sirius out of his black thoughts, out of his depression, and Athenora hadn't asked for permission – that was her thing, really, when he considered it: she never did ask for permission, she only ever relied on forgiveness. And James had not been sure whether he was burning with jealousy or with desperation, but he'd burned all right, and it had been one of the most surreal experiences of his life, watching this girl he'd had for the whole summer kissing Sirius like she knew he needed something violent and painful and soothing and soft all at once to bring him back from whatever brink he was teetering on, while she'd encouraged James to disrobe her.

They'd all been naked in the end, though Athenora had begun and finished the whole thing as a wall between the two boys, a glass pane that protected them from all the wrongness they both found in participating in such an act with each other, and in the end the whole bloody point of the thing was to make Sirius feel good, to make him forget about all the shit in his life, and Athenora had known _exactly_ how to do that, how to be rough and gentle with him at the same time, how to give him what he needed, and what he wanted, and James adored her for it, because she brought Sirius back in less time than James had needed to figure out what he could even _do_ , let alone actually do it.

And now Sirius was looking almost happy, lazing about on the bed after what was apparently a profoundly pleasurable experience in spite of all its inherent awkwardness given the turnabout from his mood this morning, and James was sitting on the padded windowsill with Athenora between his legs, resting her back to his chest. In that silken bathrobe she favoured after shagging, with one of those cigarettes of hers lit up between her fingers, she looked as pleased as a Kneazle who'd caught a bird in its jaws, and all right, she certainly had cause to it, because that was possibly the most intense experiences of James' life, and she'd not even minded when he'd collapsed over her and hadn't been able to move for too long.

"It's weed. Cannabis," she clarified when they both gave her a confused look. "Here, you can have my joint, I've got plenty more."

She got up to hand Sirius her lit cigarette – joint? – and stepped around to quickly prepare herself another with deft fingers that moved smoothly through the motions.

"This is different," Sirius noted, letting a plume of smoke out through his lips and nose.

"Much better, too," Athenora agreed. "Takes the edge off quite nicely, and it's not as debilitating as it is for No-Majs. They tend to get quite stoned on it, never very pleasant in my opinion. Then again, it also depends on your supplier and the quality of what you buy. There's a very lovely werewolf who has the magical market more or less cornered on it back in Boston, she's always got the best stuff. But that's expected, of course."

The silence that descended was as heavy as the stench of the smoke wafting between all of them in the room.

"Yes? Something I said?" Athenora asked archly after a moment, coming back to take her seat in James' arms.

"Expected?" James asked, eying Sirius for a long moment, the way that his face had closed off and pinched up.

"Yes, it does wonders for their anxiety pre- and post-full moon, very useful. Not legal, of course, but then legality is such an overrated concept anyway. I'm assuming there's a werewolf in the mix here as well?"

"Well..."

"Not anymore," Sirius bit out viciously, sucking in another deep lungful of smoke. "We don't abide by traitors, you see."

"What did he do, then?"

"Called us as good as Death Eaters, accused us of being evil. He chose _her_ over us."

"Her?"

"Miss Perfect Prefect Sodding Saint Evans."

Athenora cocked her head a bit and studied Sirius.

"That wouldn't happen to be Lily Evans? Jimmy mentioned her, something about humiliating her friend in order to show her that he's not good enough for her where Jimmy is?"

Sirius sat up suddenly, and James pulled back a bit from Athenora to get a better look at her.

"Well, Remus, who had until then been perfectly fine with all of it, suddenly decided that what we were doing wasn't rubbing him the right way anymore, and tried to act all high and mighty. Threatening that he'd not _let_ us do what we want, as if he's got some power to control us, as if he's the only one who knows right from wrong."

"Well, some people aren't comfortable with vindictiveness; seems he's one of them," Athenora pointed out with a shrug. "There isn't much to be done about those people; they usually can't grasp the point of it, and get very upset when they witness it from people they're close to; they tend to feel it's something that requires 'correcting'."

"Vindictiveness?" James repeated, frowning. "We aren't vindictive."

"You aren't? Sounded like it to me – what else would you call violence because of a personal vendetta?"

"It's _not_ a personal vendetta! It's fair play – he attacks us _constantly_."

"I don't see why it can't be both," Athenora replied, sitting up straighter to meet James' eyes. "Why does it upset you so much that I call it that? You targeted him for a purpose, which was to drive a wedge between him and Lily Evans, because she's better off without him. Your feelings for her make it personal, as I suspect he's competition for her affection, and if it's personal, then it's vindictive. Vendetta means a prolonged feud with someone over personal injuries caused by one side or the other. I'm simply calling a spade 'a spade'."

"It's cause it makes him sound petty," Sirius explained with a smirk. "Evans doesn't like pettiness."

"I imagine she wouldn't, though I don't think she'd like vindictiveness any better, either."

"You can say that again," Sirius muttered under his breath, no doubt remembering, like James was, that retaliatory attack Lily had gifted them with by the lake. Merlin, James still felt queasy just thinking about the slugs.

"You really think we're vindictive?" James asked the girl, stung though he wasn't quite sure why; Athenora certainly looked utterly fine with all of it, unlike Lily.

"Bullying usually is considered such, yes," she confirmed, taking a puff of her joint and letting it out. "How long ago did you start going after this guy, anyway?"

"From the start, of course; slimy Snivelly asked for it, you know."

"Oh, I don't doubt that, most people do," she confirmed with a quick smile. "I was just wondering because it seems Remus was rather late to finding his conscience, if that's the case. Bit weak-spirited of him, that."

"Conscience?" James asked again, feeling dumb for constantly echoing her words, but not quite feeling like he had any handle on the conversation.

Sirius certainly didn't have any such problem. "That's exactly what I told him! It's Evans, I tell you; she's been putting things in his head, and James is so infatuated with her he can't see it."

"Hey, that's not true!"

Sirius rolled his eyes, as if to say 'see what I mean?', for which James rewarded him with a heavy glare, because Sirius knew that he didn't tolerate such talk about Lily. His best friend pretended not to notice from long practice, saying instead: "Remus was fine until he started spending time with her, and you know, I can't even figure out how that even came _about_."

"It started soon after that time she yelled at you and threatened to expose Remus to the whole common room."

Sirius scoffed. "Oh, that business. Yes, she's gotten Remus hung up on that, too!"

"What business is that?" Athenora asked.

"I played a prank on Snivellus during the full moon, let him see a bit of a glimpse of Remus, scare him a bit. Everyone was fine, not like anyone would have gotten hurt anyway, James pulled him out of the way, and the bugger deserved it, he's _constantly_ putting his big nose in our business, but apparently Miss Prefect St. Evans feels that this is somehow _monstrous_ and now Remus does, too!"

"Well, your actions can be easily construed as you trying to feed a boy to him while he was not in control of his faculties," the girl pointed out sardonically. "Whether or not you wanted that outcome – or if it was even a possible outcome – is probably irrelevant to him, because it's a threat to his space, and that's a breach of trust I'd not expect him to forgive. People tend to have a problem with harming others, and werewolves are normally touchy about whom they trust with their space during full moons in my experience, which is perfectly expected, seeing how their condition forces them into it."

"But nothing happened!"

"Instinct doesn't care for logic or rationality, Sirius. Your reasoning wouldn't change the fact that he doesn't feel safe with you anymore, especially anywhere near his transformation. A threat is a threat to the subconscious mind, and that's what lycanthropy is all about, once you boil it down to basics."

"He was fine with it for three months afterwards," James felt the need to point out.

"Was he really?"

Well... all right, not completely fine with it; Remus was definitely reluctant afterwards to get out of the cottage – they spent all of the March full moon in it, actually – and then April and May didn't go over so very well, what with Remus almost slipping their watch and nearly running into those Hogsmeade residents. And actually, now that he was considering it, Remus had been pretty reluctant about the whole thing that last time they'd talked about exploring Hogwarts grounds. He'd acquiesced in the end, like he always did, but perhaps he wasn't really 'fine' with it, exactly.

"Maybe not fully, but he still didn't say anything until June, and this happened in February!"

"Well, he wasn't friends with Lily Evans in February, was he?"

"What difference does that make?"

"She means, Prongs, that it was Evans who got him all turned around and thinking we're some sort of, of psychopaths!"

"No, I actually meant that he got himself another support system so he felt safe enough to tell you that you'd lost his trust, in case what happened _did_ happen – werewolves are some of the wizarding population most at risk of suicide, especially if they're as young as your friend is, and they need a very strong support system to cope with the curse, obviously he was aware of that on some level – but I suppose that shows he did take your measure early enough so as not to tip himself over the edge."

"And what's that supposed to mean?" Sirius challenged her, even as James' mind tripped over itself at the rest of her sentence.

"Just that you can't have cared very much for him, and that he obviously understood that on a more primitive level, even if he no doubt liked to think otherwise," Athenora answered matter-of-factly, without any combativeness or even, really, as if she didn't perceive Sirius was spoiling for a fight, as if they were doing anything else but conversing about the weather.

Sirius growled and jumped to his feet, fists clenched. "I cared about him! He was one of my best friends, and he betrayed _me_!"

Athenora lifted a sculpted eyebrow. "Not _such_ a best friend, really. After all, you renounced him when he tried to reach out to you because of a problem he had with you. No doubt he saw that as your betrayal first, and then of course retaliated as should be expected. You really don't need to pretend with me, Sirius, I won't think worse of you for it. There really isn't much point," she decided thoughtfully, taking a drag of her joint. "People don't change, and not understanding them from the start only makes relations complicated. I suspect you just took the wrong measure of him and thought it more profitable to present a façade. But then that's standard with people one doesn't trust."

"You think I didn't _trust_ him?" Sirius filled the sentence with as much sense of ludicrousness as he seemed capable of.

"Given your general tendency towards mistrust of Dark Magic, I should say that would be obvious," the girl noted. "Werewolves are called Dark creatures for a reason. Do you really think you could trust him, given his curse?"

Exhaling very forcefully, Sirius stubbed the joint in her ashtray and then walked out of the room in only his pants, slamming the door on his way. Athenora didn't react in any way, just watched it thoughtfully and dragged in a puff of her own joint. James' mind was for a long moment preoccupied with Sirius' deteriorating mood and whether he should say something about it, but a more pressing worry quickly reasserted itself, making him rear up and turn Athenora around properly to face him.

"So, wait a second. What were you saying, about the suicide risks?"

"Werewolves very often commit suicide," Athenora repeated, a bit more pointedly than she'd been saying everything else. "They can't handle the guilt of infecting others, and unless there's someone to restrain them, they attack another person sooner or later. Put that together with the societal stigma, which isn't fair but also isn't baseless because they _are_ some of the most dangerous creatures in existence during the full moon, and it's really no surprise to me at all that it's easier for them to kill themselves than fight a losing battle month after month after month. Well, that or turn to savagery completely and simply not think about it anymore. When was Remus turned, recently?"

"No, he... he, ah, he was four, almost five," James said weakly, suddenly feeling like he couldn't quite get enough air in his lungs. At his answer, Athenora's eyebrows rose almost to her hairline.

"Four years old? To even survive the initial attack, and then... I wish I could meet him; even with all his flopping about on the moral front, he must be something."

"Are you... Athens, are you saying..."

"That it's a miracle he's alive? Yes, that's what I'm saying. The number of lycanthropic children who grow into adulthood is miniscule. It's not unseen, of course, but it's extremely rare."

"And what was that about..." James licked his lips, swallowing past his dry throat, "about safe enough to tell us, and something happening?"

"Getting rejected by you for voicing his issues with your behavior that led to him losing trust in you," she clarified. "If you're the only people who know of his condition, then it would quite naturally be hard for him to break off his connections with you, because he'd be alone. If I've gotten my timing correct, then Lily Evans stepped in when you let him down, and that's why he felt safe enough to tell you, because he's worked himself out a new support system, which is really to his credit, that he could trust another peer after how your actions impacted him."

"And if... if this had happened, but Lily hadn't been there for him?"

"I would have been worried he would try to harm himself, through neglect if nothing else," Athenora confirmed.

James felt sick.

"You're saying that it would have been our fault."

"It's not about how you see things, it's about how he does," Athenora said. "Sirius apparently massively overstepped on that one and doesn't seem to realize it's hurt your friend. Given his home life, I'm not surprised he doesn't understand how healthy relationships work, and he seems very hung up on being forced or allowed to take certain actions, no doubt because of how controlling his home environment is, but you might want to step in and fix this once you get back to school. If you actually still care to be friends with Remus, I mean."

"No, I care, I just– How do you know all this?"

"No-Majs have all sorts of interesting topics to read about, and besides that, I have experience with people whose perception of the world doesn't exactly align correctly."

"One of those friends you'll be travelling with?"

"Yes, Chrissy, among others. He's... different. He isn't good with human interactions."

"Is that how you knew what Sirius needed?"

"No, Jimmy, that's just being a perceptive female," she answered, her lips curling into a dryly amused smile. "And it was fun, wasn't it?"

He wasn't exactly sure about that, and he didn't think he'd want to repeat the experience, but, "It was something, yeah."

* * *

Severus returned about a week before the school year was to start, which was nice because that way Lily and he had time to catch up on the events of the last three weeks and develop some sort of battle plan. Since their talk, Lily's dad had started slowly migrating his things up to Manchester, one box at a time, though he was still living at home – he said he didn't want to waste the last couple of weeks of Lily and Petunia's stay, and apparently no one was willing to object to that very loudly, so things had stayed status-quo. But Lily needed to go down to London to catch the Hogwarts Express from the start of the journey, so they'd decided to go up to Manchester two days before to set up his flat, as Petunia was going with their mother and the Dalloways down to London on the weekend. Lily wasn't able to tell whether Monica approved or resented the idea; what she'd all but demanded, though, was to get time before Lily's departure with both her and Petunia on their own (which Lily wanted as well and readily agreed to), so the final agreement ended up being that Lily and Stephen would arrive in London on Tuesday morning, so that Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning would be mother/daughter time until Hogwarts Express departed at eleven. Lily's idea was to have Severus come with and board the train in Manchester, as they weren't supposed to be seen together anymore. And this was one of the things that was on the agenda for the week.

Other things were Lily's general home situation, Severus mostly not sharing how his mother had reacted to him being away from home for four weeks, and what all he'd learned while at Hogwarts. And, of course, how they were going to pull off staying friends while hiding it.

Lily _hated_ it. Having spent the past two years trying to pull Severus away from that darkness that was the junior Death Eater group, it felt like she was being slingshotted to the exact opposite of the spectrum, where now they'd pulled Severus so far away from her she was his dirty little secret. At the same time, though, she _knew_ that he was doing this for her, and that what he needed the most from her was her support and cooperation. It was something she was going to have to learn to deal with, and fast, and it made her anxious and jittery, which was the exact opposite of what she had to be in order to pull off this deception.

And the truth was, she was _horrible_ at deceptions. Lily's lies tended to be lies of omission, and those she could do quite well, but outright lies were much harder, because her emotions were all on the surface, right there for everyone to see. She could do them, if she got comfortable with them beforehand, but even then, it was nothing so expansive and involving as _this_. Severus insisted that they practice over the week, spinning scenarios where they were potioneering partners and needed to act like they only tolerated each other because they had to, but it didn't go over too well – Lily kept bursting into giggles, from nerves and the vague sense of silliness in the whole charade, and Severus kept getting progressively more frustrated.

Finally, about three days in, he handed her a rather heavy book.

"Here, read that," he instructed her, and her mind registered the title – _The Mind Arts, Volume 1: Occlumency_. "I'll speak with Dumbledore about giving you some lessons."

"All right," Lily agreed, though she had to frown. "Why can't you give me lessons?"

"Because I don't know Legilimency yet, and I can help you with the exercises, but you can't know how well you're doing it without someone probing your shields."

Lily read the first couple of chapters that night and decided this was going to be most likely only more of the same, because the whole thing made practically no bloody sense. Empty your mind? What the hell did that even _mean_? But Severus thought it would work better than all the other stuff they'd tried, like remembering how she'd felt when she'd been angry with him (which Lily categorically didn't want to do, because if she ended up getting angry for no good reason, Severus would just end up retreating into himself again, and that would feel far too much like last spring, with their half-finished arguments and their tentativeness, and Lily really didn't want to go back to that), so she was going to trust him on it.

And thinking of last spring and trusting Severus made her remember that time when she'd ditched him to go exploring with Remus, and how angry and hurt he'd been for it, and suddenly she understood _far_ better why he'd been so unhappy with her over it. She'd not understood then, even when he'd explained, but that must have happened when Severus was only starting out as Dumbledore's spy and he'd known that he'd not be able to stay openly friends with her for long, and she remembered what she'd told Remus on the train about ultimatums and the danger of Severus' position. And of course, now that such meetings were going to be the only chances they'd have in the coming future to interact openly, suddenly Lily understood _exactly_ what Severus' problem with it had been, and she felt ashamed for lying to him.

So when the following Sunday morning they met at their spot, Lily made her decision on that – they were trying to do better by each other, and Severus deserved a proper apology, even if it was months late, because she knew he would not have forgotten it. He didn't forget these kinds of things, and so it was the right thing to do.

* * *

The weather was turning, _finally_. After months of clear skies, there were _heavy_ black clouds in the sky, and the air was almost electric with the anticipation of the deluge promised within them.

Lily's mood seemed to match the darkened horizon when Severus walked down to their spot on Sunday morning, and to be honest, his was about there, too, because they were catching the Hogwarts Express on Wednesday, and Severus had no clue how they were going to pull any of it off. He doubted Lily would be able to learn much from the Occlumency book; given everything he knew of the Mind Art, she was singularly unsuited for it, wearing her emotions on her sleeve and never needing to compartmentalise anything in her life. And if they messed this up, it would be even more suspicious than if they'd just pretended they'd made up over the summer.

Severus couldn't regret telling her, but in the grand scheme of things, he was not feeling very good about the fact that Lily knew of his duties for Dumbledore, either. He wasn't looking forward to Hogwarts particularly much.

"Severus, I have something I have to say."

Instantly on guard, Severus eyed her warily. "Lily?"

She fidgeted with the hem of her shirt, not exactly looking him in the eye.

"You remember that day, when we were supposed to brew together, and I forgot and arranged to spend time with Remus instead? Because I thought it was about getting you into the lab so that you could do experiments, but you told me that it was about spending time together, just the two of us."

"Yes," Severus said, crossing his arms over his chest and watching her with a frown. What in the world was she doing, bringing that up now? He'd berated himself over feeling dissatisfaction with the way that had been resolved, and he'd told himself he was being utterly irrational about it. This... wasn't looking towards the good. "What about that?"

Lily licked her lips and took a moment, before finally meeting his eyes with obvious resolve.

"First, I'm sorry for not understanding what you actually meant by it. Now I know about... about the Slytherins and, and how it must be for you. I just. I'm sorry."

"All right."

"And secondly..." She took a deep breath, and almost stumbled over her words. "That day, when we met for lunch, I told you that we'd gotten trapped by the castle and that's why I couldn't come back on time, a-and that's true, but I also... I also lied. I forgot, _again_ , and I was afraid to admit it, because... because you were already angry with me about doing it the first time, and I felt like if I told you, you'd pull away from me even further, and I felt like _such_ an idiot for letting you down and I'm so sorry. I know it's been months since then, but I just... we're both trying to do better by each other, and this was, this was bad of me, so I just... wanted you to know. I'm sorry."

"You'd _forgotten_?" the hissed words escaped him before Severus had even thought them, Lily's admission feeling like a slap in the face, all the resentment of that day welling up like a pus from a badly healed wound.

"I did, and I felt _awful_ about it as soon as I realised," Lily answered, taking a step towards him, hand extended. Severus jerked back, staring at her green eyes, disbelief warring with betrayal.

"It's good to know that our time meant so little to you then compared to your time with that bloody werewolf," he snarled at her angrily.

"I'm sorry, Severus. There's no justification for it, I buggered it up. I'd buggered a lot of things up back then. I've tried so hard to do better this summer, and I didn't want to hurt you with this, but I think we both agree that a cruel truth is better than a comforting lie, and that we've said too many untrue things in the last few years. I was unfair about a lot of things simply because it suited me to be, and that is not the person I want to be. You deserved to know, and I owed you the truth. I just... I'm really sorry."

What good were her 'sorry's to him, Severus thought angrily, when she'd forgotten him twice in one day, for Remus bloody Lupin. He remembered most all of that affair, too, oh did he – he'd actually accused her of missing their agreed-upon meeting twice, and she'd... she'd changed the subject, hadn't she, instead of saying anything, she'd changed it to–

 _Oh, fucking hell_. The knowledge of what he had to do, the certainty of what was going to come out of his mouth in the next minute, it went like ice through his core, and watching her with his head swimming with panic and despair and anger and hurt, Severus didn't even know if he was doing it because she'd made the first move towards honesty with him, or because the honest regret in her eyes was twisting something in his stomach, or because it was going to hurt him so much worse, but it was going to hurt her too and he wanted her to hurt, in that moment, he _really_ wanted her to hurt the way that he was hurting.

For a Slytherin, Severus was sure turning out to have a shitty sense of self-preservation.

"I have to tell you something, too."

The way she drew into herself meant she understood it wouldn't be any good. Severus had no idea what she saw on his face, what all of his chaotic thoughts he was revealing to her.

The words felt stuck in his throat, refusing to come out. He swallowed thickly, combativeness leaving him until he'd hunched into himself a bit, anger flickering out in light of his growing panic. But he'd made the decision, and he clung to Dumbledore's words of assurance, feeble as they were, and he placed his trust in Lily, because trusting his knowledge of her was telling him that this was the last time they'd speak, and he couldn't, _couldn't_ stand that, not after everything they'd been through this year.

So he took a deep breath, and he closed his eyes, then opened them again – he deserved to watch Lily's face when she comprehended the truth, to see the rejection in real time, as it happened, the way he'd seen it by the lake two months ago, because he still felt utterly horrid about what he'd been a part of, and he deserved to hurt for it.

(A different part of him, the small, shy part that reached out for Dumbledore's respect and cried at his mother's belittling insults, that part of him also wanted to watch, for a completely different reason – that part trusted _Lily_ , not his knowledge _of_ her, and that part held the burning hope that all wouldn't be lost, held it so tightly it felt like it was boiling inside him from how hard he was pushing it down, locking it up with his Occlumency skills, because being disappointed would be so, so much worse than accepting the inevitable.)

Lily lost the colour in her cheeks before Severus uttered a single word.

"I was part of the attack on the seventh-years."

Lily's eyes widened, and her already pale face became white as a sheet. Severus watched as, almost in slow motion, her hand went up to her mouth and she stumbled back a step, staring at him as if she couldn't look anywhere else, and yet couldn't bear to look at him a moment further.

"No."

That one word galvanised him, made him take an involuntary step forward, and it felt almost like they were dancing, a step forward, a step back, except there was nothing Severus want to do more than to stop it.

"I didn't know, Lily, I swear to you, I didn't – it was an induction mission for Mulciber, to join the Death Eaters, and he'd not told any of us anything except for Avery – I was putting up wards while they were – I wasn't even in the room – the moment I realised what was going on, _the moment_ – I made them stop, I made them stop the moment I realised, but it was – it was too late – I had no choice, you must see that, I had no – I got Rosier to help clean up, he was –" A tear rolled down Lily's cheek, then another "– he was the one who pointed Mulciber in their direction – I thought it was just another of their hazings of Gryffindors – I told Dumbledore everything – I, I, I couldn't stand what we'd done, and I – it made me join your side – I couldn't – Merlin, I swear, Lily, I'd _never_ have – if I'd known, I'd never have let them do it, I'd have – I'm sorry, Merlin, Lily, I'm sorry, I wish – I wish I could take it back, that day, I wish – please –"

"You _lied_ to me," she said through gritted teeth, and Severus stopped, rooted to the spot by the look of overwhelming _fury_ that rose up on her face. "I _asked you_ to tell me the truth, and you _lied to my face_!"

"I did – I apologise – Dumbledore insisted that you should, should hear it from me, that – and, and I knew –" He swallowed with difficult, clenching his fists to hide the way they shook. "Lily–"

"Clara couldn't walk for _six weeks_!" Lily exclaimed, stepping aggressively forward, and Severus' foot moved back of its own accord, but he forced himself to keep his ground, to hold fast as she advanced on him. "Jasper still hasn't got his voice back properly! And _Holland_ –" She choked on a sob, shook her head, and landed her fists on his chest angrily, making him wince.

"I know," Severus whispered, bowing his head to her, staring as her fists slid down his shirt-clad chest to lie limply by her hips. He shut his eyes tightly and clenched his jaw, but didn't try to drive away the memories of that day. The back of his throat tasted of bile. "I should have done something."

"You should have," Lily choked out quietly, before swallowing and taking a step back. "I can't look at you right now," she spat out like venom from a hissing, enraged snake, and Severus' head snapped up, black eyes meeting green, his turn to take a step towards her.

"Lily–"

"I can't fucking _look at you_ anymore. Just– stay there, Severus. I mean it, don't come after me."

And then she was running away from him, back towards her house, and Severus' legs gave out, knees hitting the hard, parched ground. He barely felt the shooting pain up his legs, his mind filled with the look of disgust on her face, the searing fury in her voice.

As if to accentuate the utter despair Severus felt in that moment, a lightning flashed across the sky, followed by the ground-shaking sound of thunder.

Then it began to rain, for the first time in months.

Severus didn't notice. Sitting on his legs with his hands limply on his lap and his dripping hair hanging on the edges of his vision, all he could think was: ' _I've lost her._ '

He wasn't sure he knew how to breathe anymore.

* * *

"Her mistaken ideas about Remus aside, I like her; she's much better for you than Evans," Sirius told James while they were roaming Diagon Alley, shopping for their school things. They had James' Cloak with them, because Sirius did _not_ intend to have any sort of confrontation with anyone from his family, but on the other hand, he couldn't go on without a wand, and they both needed books and such. Uncle Alphard had given him access to his vault – Sirius had protested without much heat, because at least Uncle Alphi was family, and so much as they sometimes felt like it, James' parents really weren't. He had no clue what he was going to do about money for the next two years, now he was completely cut off from his inheritance, but he was going to figure it out.

Mostly, that was what he was telling himself these days – he was going to figure it out, and James was going to help him do it, and he still had Uncle Aphard and he had Fleamont and Euphemia too, which was enough. He wasn't quite sure how long he'd have Uncle Alphard for, because when Regulus had told him a few months back that Uncle Alph wasn't doing well, Sirius hadn't quite realised it was _this_ bad, but he was going to make the best of it.

Uncle Alphard had hugged him and kissed his temple and he'd not quite been able to get out of his chair when he'd done it, which was insane for a man who was forty-six bloody years old, but the first thing he'd told Sirius was that to him, they were still family, that no one could ever make them not be so, and that he loved Sirius. And Sirius had broken down and cried a bit, and then he'd made his uncle swear not to tell anyone, not _anyone_ , and when Uncle Alphi had done so, Sirius had turned into Padfoot. Uncle Alphard had not said anything for a very long time, but there had been pride and grief in his eyes in equal measure, and in the end Padfoot had rested his head on his uncle's knee and listened while his uncle informed him of how everything had gone down at Grimmauld Place that night and since.

And then when he'd come back, there had been that rather surreal afternoon of shagging that Sirius had no idea what to do with and so decided not to do anything about at all, except to very firmly decide that, if it happened that he'd had a shag with a girl, and James had had a shag with a girl, and that it happened to be the same girl in both scenarios, and that the two scenarios actually happened at the same time, it absolutely didn't mean that he and James had had done anything even _insinuated_ as a shag with each other, _thank fucking Merlin ever so much_ , because no part of him had touched any part of James, and really, watching had never counted anyway, and besides, it had probably been one of the better shags of his life, so he was just not going to think about it anymore.

Athenora was James' anyway, Sirius didn't actually want any sort of repeat experience, and besides, she was so much better for him than Saint Evans; Athens actually understood how they all thought and she agreed with them about everything, even considering the way she saw Remus' actions and Sirius' response to them. She wasn't right about the whole mistrust thing – Sirius _didn't_ care about Remus' condition, not in the least – but given that she didn't know either him or Remus, she could be forgiven for making assumptions, especially when she didn't use those assumptions to act all high-and-mighty, like some other birds Sirius could name.

"It's not a permanent thing, Padfoot," James reminded him with a roll of his eyes.

"Only because she's American; I'm sure you could convince her to make something concrete of it, and I know you want to."

"No, I don't," the answer came almost automatically. "I want Lil–"

"Oh, get off it," Sirius scoffed. "The last time you had words with Evans, she made you vomit slugs. Athens is there and willing and you're into her."

"I am _not_ in love with her."

"You said it, mate, not me."

James stopped and looked at Sirius with alarm on his face. "I'm not!"

After giving it a bit of a thought, Sirius was forced to incline his head in acquiescence. "No, but you fancy her rather a lot, way more than you ever fancy most of the broads you pick up at Hogwarts."

Relaxing slightly, James nodded. "Suppose I do, at that. It's just that, it was understood, yeah? That it's just for the summer, then I'd go back to Lily and she'd go do her thing."

"A – you don't _have_ Lily Evans, and you're not like to, either, given that she's now apparently all self-righteous about Remus and is fine with cursing you when you annoy her, and B – you've no idea what Athenora might think until you ask her."

They had to enter _Ollivanders_ , where thankfully the man found Sirius another wand quickly enough, and then they wandered through _Flourish and Blotts_ in search of N.E.W.T. textbooks – Sirius had failed History of Magic, while James had passed all of it – and of course ran straight into a Black family member.

Well, ex-family member, and Sirius found himself suddenly unsure whether he wanted to grin like a lunatic, or hide under James' Cloak.

"Hi!" the little girl said, giving him a wide grin once she'd righted herself from where she'd smacked into Sirius' legs. Her hair was a wild teal colour, but her facial features were all Black. "Sorry!"

"It's ok," Sirius said, a bit choked up, lifting his gaze to her mother, who'd slowed in her step and stopped fully once their eyes met. "Hi, Dromeda."

"Sirius," Andromeda Tonks said softly, cautiously.

"Guess what?" he blurted out with a false, probably slightly crazed look on his face. "I've caught a bit of a fire recently."

His cousin eyed him a moment, before nodding and, with two swift steps, moving to hug him. "Welcome to the dark side, then, Cousin."

"We've got biscuits!" the little girl exclaimed and then giggled, apparently not minding at all that she was being a bit squished between their legs. Andromeda bent down and picked her up, settling her expertly on her own hip so that the girl was now at face height with the two of them, more or less.

"Nymphadora, this is my cousin Sirius. Siri, this is my daughter."

"Hi, Nymphadora."

The girl made a face, and Sirius had to blink when he realised that for her, apparently, 'making a face' meant _actually_ changing her facial structure into that of a disgruntled horse.

" _Dora_ ," she corrected very strictly. "Only Mama calls me Nym-pha-dora."

Sirius blinked at her and nodded, before refocusing her mother.

"She's a Metamorphmagus."

"Apologies, we're having a bit of a winged horse phase. And yes, we've no idea where that came from, given Ted's heritage and the utter lack of any such skill on my side of the family," Andromeda confirmed. "Whom are you staying with, Uncle Alphard?"

"No, he's... he's not doing well. I'm with James and his family, will be next summer too. Listen, now I'm on the outs, I'll write you, yeah? We could go see Uncle Alphi together, I know he'll be glad to see you, and no one pays any attention to his place anyway. Aunt Lucretia probably, too, you know how she and Orion can't stand each other, and I know she still writes Cedrella."

"We've got some winged horses at the Manor," James butted in with a respectful tone. "You're welcome to visit, Mother loves the company, and Dora could spend some time with the Aethonans."

"Thank you for the invite, I'll discuss it with my husband," Andromeda replied noncommittally, even as Dora exclaimed: "Horseys! Wanna go see them, Mama!"

Once she'd shushed her daughter, Andromeda turned back to Sirius. "Thank you for that wedding invite; I assume that was your doing, then?"

"Yes; you deserved to get it even if you were never going to go, she's your sister, and if it got Mother's blood pressure up a bit, well..." he shrugged. "Though whatever you've heard or not about... that _wasn't_ me, all right? That was Bellatrix."

He had to make sure she knew that. He'd never actually wanted to spoil Narcissa's wedding, and he couldn't have Andromeda thinking badly of him because of it. He knew she and Narcissa had been close before she'd eloped and gotten disowned, and he had no doubt word had reached her about that fiasco. So he needed her to know, that it wasn't him. Because he didn't want her upset with him.

Andromeda's first response was to blink rather indecipherably at him.

"Ah. Well, I'm not surprised. I sent Cissy some flowers, hopefully Mother's head didn't explode. I was informed Bella's spite hadn't, in fact, ruined it and that it was rather a lovely wedding, though they did their utmost to conceal the circumstances of your mysterious nonattendance. I hadn't expected... this... though I cannot claim to be surprised, either."

"Birds of a feather, eh?" Sirius said with a shrug. "Listen, we've got to dash, but I'll be in touch, yeah? We disowned Blacks should stick together."

"Of course. Good day, Sirius."

"Bye, Sirius!" Dora exclaimed, waving her little hand at him, and Sirius responded in kind, moving closer to James to let them pass. Once they were out of sight, he let his breath out quite gustily, earning himself a smack on the back from his best friend.

"More family crawling out of the woodwork; see, I told you it was going to work out."

"Yeah. Yeah, I guess; Dora really is adorable, isn't she?"

"She's a peach, Siri. And I think she already likes you, Uncle."

Sirius grinned so hard his face hurt.

* * *

Lily was drenched by the time she finally found her way back home. She didn't much care. Her mind was still far too occupied with sharp, jagged anger and the disgust that tasted acidic on her tongue, her jaw still hurting from all the things she'd wanted to say to Severus, wanted to hurl at him and had managed not to, and though the exhausting run and subsequent long walk had helped her bring her temper back into check, the anger was barely faded any.

The walk in the near-deluge had helped her put some things into order, though, the primary of which was parsing out everything that Severus had stuttered out at her in those moments when she'd been so utterly shocked out of herself that her mind had been alike to the television snow, words she'd barely heard over the rush of blood in her ears. Yet her mind had caught them nonetheless, because a part of her had known just how important those words were, and once she'd gotten over the urge to do something she knew she'd regret later – why she'd had to literally run away from Severus, because looking at him would have made her say things, and those things needed to not be said, those barely true things needed to never be said – Lily had found some space in her brain to review his explanation, and things had coalesced into her mind, to make her angry for a very different reason.

It _had_ been the whole bloody fifth-year junior Death Eater group who'd attacked Lily's friends, of course it had, Mulciber and Avery had been implicated from the start, and when had they ever truly hung out with the older crowd? Never, that was the answer, so Lily should have bloody caught onto that fact and deduced that Severus had also taken part in it. But the thought of him doing something so vile, something so vicious and utterly devoid of compassion or empathy, it had been impossible to believe, to even imagine, and so she hadn't.

He'd said that he'd not known what he'd been getting into, and Lily knew this for the half-lie that it was – he'd known they were about to do _something_ like that. Hazing the Gryffindors, he'd called it, and she'd wanted to strangle him for it, except it had sounded exactly like Black's 'playing with the Slytherins', except she'd known that he participated in these little cannon fires between the two Houses, of course he did, and she could believe that he'd thought it would be something like that.

The truth was, Severus was a cruel boy, to a certain extent – he retaliated against Potter and his group regularly and with relish, he went after other students with his group, he loved inventing painful hexes and curses, he knew precisely what to say to wound emotionally – and Lily had tried very, very hard to forget that even when he'd been cruel to her, because if she hadn't, they would have stopped being friends long ago. But he'd been doing better this summer, towards Petunia and Remus and especially towards Lily, and in light of that, things made more sense, because he'd sounded so very guilty and remorseful about the attack on the seventh-years, and he'd even said that this was what had ultimately made him choose Light. So perhaps he was cruel, but he had a line, and his Slytherin friends had crossed that line, had made _him_ cross that line, and now he was Lily's, forever. And every time she started asking herself what in the world she was doing being friends with him, trying so hard again, she came back to this fact.

Severus was a cruel boy, but Dumbledore had somehow made him see that line of his, and ever since crossing over it unwillingly, Severus had tried very hard to get away from it in spite of his natural inclinations – Lily and this excruciatingly hot summer bore witness to that. And that counted for everything in her mind, so much as she in her fury and hurt and disgust didn't want it to.

And really, with his parents and his home life, it wasn't even a surprise that he was a cruel boy, was it, when he'd not had anyone to learn compassion from. Certainly he couldn't have learned kindness from Lily, not when all she'd been doing in the last few years was enforcing his worldview, the one fed to him so regularly by the Slytherin House. But he could change, and he _wanted_ to change, and Lily held onto that, both for her own sake and for the sake of their friendship. She had no idea how she'd manage to teach him, not now when he was only going to be getting deeper into the circle of cruelty and viciousness that was Lord Voldemort's group, but she was going to have to try, because he was going into the labyrinth of hell for her, and he'd cast her as his Ariadne, holding the other end of that ball of thread so that he'd be able to do his task and come back to her safely. And she believed in him enough to take up that job without qualm, without question.

Just as soon as she managed to digest what he'd done, and not only to the seventh-years, but to her as well.

Because Lily had asked him, point blank, if he knew something about it, and he'd not told her, even though he'd already then been working for Dumbledore. He'd not told her, and then he'd gone on not telling her through all of the months of this summer, through everything that Lily had had to deal with in her home life. He'd been there, playing at her best friend, acting as more of a support than she'd ever imagined him even capable of, let alone willing – he'd even made peace with Remus for her, for Merlin's sake! – and all that time he'd been keeping this secret from her, letting her think that she'd been unfair to accuse him of knowing anything, of not trusting him.

And then, to have _Dumbledore_ be the one who convinced him to come clean! Because Lily and their friendship wasn't enough, because everything they'd gone through this summer hadn't meant enough to provoke honesty from him, it had to be Dumbledore, the man with whom Severus had developed some sort of relationship deep enough for it to matter this much, with whom he'd created a rapport he'd not told Lily a single thing about, whose involvement in what was the most monumental change of Severus' life was such that he felt he needed to protect it from Lily.

That stung. It _really_ stung.

Lily changed into an old pair of sweatpants and a spaghetti-strap shirt, squeezed the water out of her hair, and went into her room to pack, her movements still far too forceful and careless for most of the things going into her trunk. Most of the way through, she remembered that she needed put the things she needed in Manchester into a backpack, and began rifling through her trunk to get it all out.

And what was this going to mean for their arrangement for the coming days, then? Severus was supposed to come with Lily and her father to Manchester, but she couldn't stand to see his face right now, not yet, and she'd have to share space with him for forty-eight hours. And her father would notice, of course he would, and then he'd ask and Lily was _not_ going to tell him anything about this, because if he really knew what sort of person Severus was, what sort of things he'd done and was comfortable with, what he was about to do and what that meant for Lily's life...

"Lily, we'll be leaving very early in the morning, just so you know, Martine and I agreed... what are you doing?"

"Packing." No, her father couldn't know, he was one of the only adults Lily could think of who thought well of Severus, and that meant something even if they rarely interacted, it meant something important to _Lily_ , because it was her dad and her best friend and she'd always wanted Stephen to be impressed with Severus, since she was a little girl...

"Why? The first is on Wednesday, that's four days away."

God, her father had been so honest with her throughout all of this, had stood by her needs and choices and supported her and opened up to her because he believed her to be mature enough to handle it, to understand him and not judge him so harshly, and here she was, consciously planning to lie to him about _everything_ important in her life.

"Lily?"

"Hm?"

"I asked you a question, did you hear?"

Goddamn Severus bloody Snape; goddamn him for forcing her to lie and for ruining the two days she was so looking forward to. "I'm taking everything to Manchester, no point coming back." She was going to need to think of something to tell her father to explain why Severus wouldn't be coming with them.

"Manchester? And when are you going to Manchester, exactly?"

The sharpness of the tone brought Lily forcibly back to her room, and she jerked her head up to meet Petunia's narrowed eyes in a pinched face.

"You're helping him move, aren't you?"

"I..."

"So you're not angry with him any longer, is that it?" Petunia demanded, taking a step into the room and crossing her arms over her chest. "After everything he's done this summer, after what he's done to Mum, you're going to go off and _help him leave us_?!"

"You said you wanted him gone," Lily shot back, standing up to her full height, her thoughts on Severus falling into irrelevance as her turbulent feelings over her home situation surged to the fore. "He's leaving, that's what you wanted, so what's the problem?"

"That you see nothing wrong with _supporting him_ in it!"

"He wouldn't have left if Mum had done _anything_ to try and fix things between them! You think he hadn't tried to get her to see that he was unhappy in their marriage, Petunia? He'd been trying for _years_!"

"Oh, is that what he'd told you?" Petunia sneered back. "Yes, he tried so nobly that he went off and found himself some floozy student for a mistress! That's how he tried to fix things!"

"It wasn't like that, and you'd know it if you'd talked to him about it just _once_! She was the one who made him try and fix things with Mum! What sort of mistress do you think would do something like that?"

"Oh, don't be naïve, Lily! He just wants to you think that because you're his precious darling girl and he can't possibly stand to have you angry with him!"

"And you think he can stand to have _you_ angry with him?" Lily shot back. "You think it's not _gutting_ him that you won't even _look_ at him anymore?! And at least he's telling me things! Mum's not said a single word to me about their marriage, or the divorce, or even her own feelings! How am I supposed to know that she even _cares_ that they're getting a divorce when she's clammed up tighter than a–"

"Are you _blind_? Or just stupid? Because you cannot _possibly_ think that she's not suffering over everything!"

"As far as I know, she may just be hurt that she doesn't have a convenient gopher boy at her side that she can bully into doing things her way and keeping quiet when he disagrees with her! Or maybe it's her ego that's bruised because she got cheated on and it was him who left her before she had a chance to make up her mind about leaving him! Or, or, it could be that it's about the money and the social status and what _neighbors might think_! I don't bloody well know, do I, Petunia, when _she won't talk to me_!"

"You have _eyes_ , Lily!" Petunia exclaimed angrily, waving her hands in the air with force. "You can _see_!"

"So can you, Petunia! He is still your father, no matter whether you want him to be or not! If you wanted to, you'd see that this is _breaking his heart too_!"

"He deserves it!"

Growling under her breath, Lily straightened her spine and clenched her hands by her thighs. "No more than Mum does, so either they both deserve it, or neither of them does. They both broke that marriage, and I won't let their relationship influence mine with either of them."

Petunia scoffed. "Oh, here she goes again, darling perfect Lily, being all magnanimous and righteous, acting all charitable! I should have known it wouldn't last the summer!"

"Excuse me?" Lily clipped, eyes flashing.

"You! This is exactly what I should have expected from you! Pretending to be on everyone's side, pretending not to be judging, so that you can feel righteous about the fact that you're taking the side of an _adulterer_ who has _abandoned_ _his family_ , who has chosen to leave a woman who stood by his side for twenty five years while he built his career and she kept their house and she raised their children and was otherwise a _perfect_ wife! Because he got restless in his middle age, got a mid-life crisis!"

"I am not taking his side, Petunia, I am in fact keeping out of it."

"You _can't_!" Petunia almost screamed, breathing heavily. "You can't _not_ choose sides in this, Lily! Stop lying to yourself and stop trying to twist me around! Either you agree with him, or you agree with Mum!"

"I can't agree or not agree with Mum when I don't know what it would be that I'd be agreeing _to_ , Petunia! For Merlin's bloody sake, how is this something that's so hard for you to understand?! The only one who has given me information is Dad, and everything, _everything_ he's told me, Mum has so far corroborated by _acting as if what I think doesn't matter_!"

"So this is about _your_ hurt feelings, is it? You are the centre of the universe, and this _must_ be about you, like _everything_ else in this bloody house!"

"Oh, and cutting Dad out of your life _wasn't_ about your hurt feelings, was it?" Lily asked, now beyond bloody angry with her sister. Calling Lily a hypocrite was not going to be on if she was going to be one just the same. "And while we're at the 'everything else' in this house, that's not about you at all, is it? All about me? It can't _possibly_ be about you letting them talk me up at your expense just so that you can use it to fuel your ideas of my abandonment of you, so that you can feel justified and righteous about shitting on me every goddamn chance you get? Did you even _once_ tell either of them that they were hurting your feelings by talking about the Magical world and my schooling? Did you? Because I don't believe for a _second_ that Dad would have stood for it if he'd known how much it was damaging you. And which one of the two of them was doing that, remind me again? Oh, right, it was Mum, the parent you're defending as the paragon of virtue in this house."

"At least Mum has always cared about my life! Ever since you left home, he's only ever moped after you and obsessively read your letters and he's never cared one jot about my school and my friends and my interests! Just like always, just like when we were little and he indulged you with your constant, _stupid_ questions as if the sun shone our your arse and dismissed me out of hand for not giving a sodding shite about his precious history and politics!"

"Did I ever claim that he was perfect, or that he didn't make mistakes?" Lily challenged, raising her eyebrows in disbelief. "And what you said is _blatantly_ untrue, because he was the one whose letters contained all of the information about your grades and your friends and your interests! Not yours and not Mum's, his! So you bloody well tell me how that's possible if he never cared about your life!" Merlin, this was completely pointless, wasn't it? Lily abruptly gave up. "No, you know what? You're free to believe what you will. If it's that I'm picking Dad's side over Mum's, that's your business. But you believing it does not make things true, and your opinions do not have anything to do with how I treat my parents going forward, separately and together. If you're willing to let what's happened between two middle-aged adults come between you and your father, then that's your business, Petunia, but I won't, and if you want to judge me and hate me for it, you're welcome to. But I'm going to Manchester with him tomorrow, and I'm going to help him move into his flat, and when I come back home, I am going to spend half of my summer up there with him, and I don't bloody care what you or him or even Mum think about it, because it is _my_ life and _my_ relationships and _my_ choice."

Petunia pulled back, stiff-backed, face closing into that horsey, sneering expression she always wore when she thought someone beneath her.

Apparently, they'd drawn lines in the sand, and they were finding themselves on opposite sides. So be it; Lily had far too many things to deal with to indulge Petunia's pettiness and self-centredness, especially when it was encroaching on other parts of her life. It was that line that she'd told Severus about, back in July, that she'd claimed she'd recognise once she'd reached it. Well, here they were now, and as she watched Petunia storm out of her room, Lily decided that she wasn't going to budge from it. If Petunia chose to see them as enemies on this point, that was her prerogative, but Lily wasn't going to let her sister push her into that mindset out of simple hurt. As far as she was concerned, whatever happened next in the sisters' relationship, it was going to be on Petunia to decide, because it was one thing to bend and change for others, and it was completely another to let them walk all over you and influence you in ways you disliked. She was _not_ going to be like Petunia and their mum, but she was not going to be like Dad, either, and if that meant she and her sister were done, then so be it.

Plenty of things in life required some bending, but there were some things that were worth too much to compromise on, and if today and the last six months had taught her anything, it was to tell the difference. And Petunia and their parents and Severus and Remus and Potter's group and the Death Eaters and Dumbledore and his Order, they could all go to hell as far as she was concerned if they tried to make her into someone she didn't want to be.

* * *

 **A/N:** The chapter references events that took place in chapters 6 (Lily forgetting about her meeting with Severus) and 9 (Lily confronting Severus about the attack on the seventh-years) in Part I, for those who haven't reread the story recently and don't remember. The conflict will, to an extent, be resolved in the next chapter, which is also the last one for Part II, barring the final Interlude. Unfortunately, I won't be posting that chapter until at least 29th of April, as my RL workload is way too large before then.


	34. Ch II,30: To Fall and to Be Lifted Up

**A/N:** Warning for domestic violence in the first section of the chapter.

* * *

 **Chapter 30: To Fall and to Be Lifted Up**

Severus spent the day sitting on his bed, curled into the tightest ball he could form and staring at the deluge through the window. Inside, he felt the numbing effects of despair that came with acceptance. The understanding that Lily truly _was_ done with him _hurt_ , like a knife twisting slowly in his chest, deeper and deeper, never letting up, and he felt so exhausted that he couldn't even be bothered to try and remove it.

He'd failed. He'd tried _so damn hard_ , to be what she needed him to be, to prove to her that he wanted to change for her, to ensure that she never truly saw into that core of him that she could only hate, and in the end, he'd ruined it for himself, because of some idiotic impulse that made him think Dumbledore might be right and the guilt of lying to her, deceiving her when all he wanted was for her to see him as he was and love him back, at least as a friend.

He tried to convince himself, at some indeterminate point in the day, that this was for the best. He had little illusion about what the next few years were going to bring, even if he didn't quite know to which lengths he'd be expected to go. And at least this way, he didn't have to worry about Lily blowing his cover. It was going to be safer for her too, wasn't it, safe in truth the way he'd tried to make it safe in their lie, because as Dumbledore had said, she was the one weak point Severus had, and if anyone who wanted to break him were to figure it out...

And she was going to be all right, he told himself firmly. In spite of everything that happened to her this summer, Severus knew that Lily was going to be all right, because she'd told him that she'd figured things out at home, and she had Lupin now, distasteful as that thought was, and perhaps that week at the seaside had warped his brain and made him think stupid, insane thoughts, but he couldn't shake the feeling that Lupin would protect her with as much ferocity as Severus would. And maybe, when this war was over, if they were all alive, she'd find a way to forgive him this, too.

It didn't really work, of course, except in making him feel even worse. By the time five in the afternoon rolled around, there was a pressure in his chest, such pressure that his throat burned and he had trouble breathing. His eyes stung from staring into nothingness for so long, and his sinuses felt clogged, except no matter how much he was wishing he could cry, the tears wouldn't come, and he couldn't think of another way to relieve the pressure.

He _needed_ to stop the pain. He couldn't bear it any longer.

The sound of a raised voice from downstairs made him jump a bit, and his cottony mind refocused, suddenly irrationally angry, because he _detested it_ when his parents yelled at each other, and even worse, when Eileen kept her silence, from terror or shrewdness or both.

"–You goddamn pick up the phone when I call!" Severus caught the tail-end of his father's rant as he banged down the stairs. "You have _one_ job in this house, you witch, and I will not be–"

"That's enough," he growled out, sliding between his parents and interrupting Tobias' rant. They were in the living room right off the stairwell, Eileen near the door with her arms wrapped loosely around her waist, Tobias, yellowish-skinned, reedy and greying, aggressively facing her. And Severus was shorter than Tobias, but not by much at all, and after everything he'd been through in the last six months, after being tricked into meeting an enraged, hungry werewolf's eyes, challenging Tobias' glare was nothing. "Back the hell away from her."

"You keep _out_ of our business, boy! This is between me and your mother."

His breath stank of cheap booze, but his blood-shot eyes were clearer than not, and it was exactly what Severus had been expecting, because it was barely gone half-five and this was not the easily handled version of his father by a long shot.

"Not anymore, you drunken lard, so back the hell off before I hex you into a cockroach. You're about as useful as one, anyway, drinking away all the money Mother earns and not even having the temerity to be _grateful_."

The fist was expected, of course, so Severus managed to jerk back a bit; unfortunately, his mother was right behind him, something he'd not counted on, and the blow made pain explode in the middle of his face, the tangy copper taste of blood almost immediately filling his mouth.

He stumbled back into the wall and spat onto the carpet before wiping somewhat ineffectively at the blood dripping from his stinging nose with the back of his hand and meeting the man's eyes again. Adrenaline sang in his ears. His lungs felt like they could properly expand for the first time today.

"Useless piece of shite is what you are, _Dad_ ," he said, baring his teeth in a challenge. "Can't do anything but hit with your fists, can you? Beat on your son. I bet you're the pride and joy of your alky congregation. Do they know we only indulge you, Mother and I? That we could make you dance like a headless chicken and you wouldn't even know it? That for all your posturing, you're the one who's really powerless here?"

Tobias, face twisted in rage, surged forward, and Severus slid alongside the wall to evade him, letting his father smash his fist into it to a painful crunch of bones grinding together. It didn't stop him; spinning around with more agility that Severus had thought him capable of, the larger man lashed out with his left hand, managing to grab hold of Severus' shirt and slam him into the wall. Dizzy from the blow, Severus' legs gave out and he crumpled down, just in time for a sloppy kick with a house-shoe to land against his ribs. He cried out hoarsely and curled into a ball on sheer instinct, which deflected the second kick, making it instead glance off the ridge of his jaw.

"Tobias, enough!"

The scuffling made Severus immediately open his eyes and look up. Eileen was holding onto Tobias' bicep with one long-fingered hand, the other extended across his chest, perhaps in an unconscious attempt at keeping him from moving forward.

"Let me go, woman!"

"He's had enough, and your hand needs tending," Severus' mother stated, voice tightly controlled and face pinched into an inscrutable mask.

" _I_ decide when he's had enough."

"Tobias," Eileen repeated again, their eyes meeting and holding. "Your hand needs tending."

Severus' head swam as he pushed himself to his feet, curling protectively around his aching side; his thoughts were too disjointed, and he couldn't figure out if his mother had used any sort of magic to calm his father down or not, but Tobias allowed her to lead him towards their bathroom, though he grumbled along the way. Severus stood with his back covered by the wall until they'd gone out of his sight and then, sneering in simmering anger and a smidge of terror as he wiped the blood off his face thoughtlessly, he slipped into the kitchen and turned his father's usual stash locations upside down, vanishing whatever rot-gut liquor he could find in a petty attempt at vindictiveness. He didn't give a shit how much money was going down the drain because of his actions; he just wanted to get rid of the man for the night, and after letting Eileen use magic to heal his broken hand, Severus' father was going to be in search of a drink, he knew that much at least. Well, he wasn't going to find it _here_.

* * *

"Severus."

Holding onto his stinging, sluggishly bleeding nose, Severus turned back to the doorway of his room at the rare usage of his name in the house. His mother stared at him with arms crossed over her chest and a hard glint in her black eyes that made Severus' spine straighten.

He knew she wasn't here to heal _his_ injuries; he couldn't remember the last time she had done anything more than let him make his own healing potions and creams, and stock the house with gauze and plain bandages. The only time when the no-magic-in-the-house rule was openly broken was when Tobias injured himself and needed healing. Severus had long ago stopped feeling anything but outright annoyed by it, the bitterness giving way around the time when he realised that the only one who was ever going to look out for him and his health was he himself. Then the whole issue became about simple unfairness and inconvenience, even if he'd never seen his mother use magic to heal _herself_ either, when she and Tobias got into their bigger spats and he knocked her about.

Right this second, he _really_ wasn't in the mood to deal with his mother and her bloody double standards, his blood still boiling, the anger he'd spent so much time learning to carefully partition and control crawling under his skin.

"What?" he asked her, unrolling clumsily the toilet paper he'd grabbed out of the bathroom in order to tear parts to stuff into his nose. The nosebleed was not too extensive – it was a rare case when his father's blow _didn't_ break his nose, but it seemed that this was one of them – but he knew better than to put his head up and let it run down his throat.

"That girl will ruin you."

Freezing in his movements, Severus' eyes snapped to his mother's face.

"That girl?" he repeated, knowing full well of whom Eileen was speaking, but not willing to give her an inch.

"That Evans girl," his mother replied, voice cold as ice. "That Evans girl, after whom you've been running since you were nine years old, like a starved puppy who'd been given a morsel of food by a pretty face. That Evans girl, who has delivered you into the clutches of the most manipulative, hypocritical excuse for a human being that exists on this Earth. That Evans girl, who has done nothing but cause you anguish this whole summer. She will ruin you, Severus, and I will not see it."

Severus' palms began stinging from just how hard he was digging his nails into them in his clenched fists, and he took a menacing step forward, towards his mother.

" _You_ will not see it?"

"I will not," she repeated collectedly. "Whether you like it or not, boy, you are my child, and you are so blinded by your infatuation with this girl that you are apparently completely incapable of seeing your ill-fated liaison to its tragic conclusion."

"You are going to have to be a bit clearer on this, Mother," he hissed back, "because I cannot begin to comprehend what in Merlin's name you are implying."

"What I am implying, Severus, is that your precious Lily Evans will use you up and discard you like so much rubbish, the way that her kind always do. You will give your soul to a privileged girl who is incapable of comprehending a single thing about you, who will never understand the value of what she has in her hands, and who will do with it only that which will serve her selfish choices, without any regard for the damage she will cause you. And I _will not_ watch my only child be put through this, not by her and not by that headmaster of yours, and not even by Voldemort."

"Yet you will say nothing about what that man I am supposed to call father does to me?"

"I did not raise you to be a fool," Eileen snapped sharply, "and I should think you know I am not one, either. You will not deflect to my face."

"Is that what I'm doing, Mother? Deflecting?" Severus sneered, baring his bloodied teeth to her pointedly.

"Was it your concern for me that made you attack him? You seem to believe, because of the life I lead, that I have lost my wits along with my Pure-blood privilege. Who was it that taught you all you needed to be a Slytherin? Snooty teenagers like Malfoy and Rosier, was it?" She scoffed. "Do not insult me, Severus; I will tolerate much from you, but you _will_ afford me the respect I am owed as your mother."

"You don't know a single _bloody_ thing about her, or about our relationship," he said, taking two great strides to loom over his mother, the fury boiling in him as he stared her down. Eileen lifted an eyebrow and held his gaze, face like stone. "It is you who cannot comprehend what sort of person she is and who she is to me. You have _never_ tried to acquaint yourself with her, all you've ever done since I was nine years old was scowl disapprovingly at us and lift your nose up at the _one_ good thing in my life that is all mine. And that you would _imply_ –"

"That you would deny it to my face is downright disgraceful," his mother cut him off. "And how does this differ from any other time that came before today? I have had more than enough to judge her character on, and your knowledge of it does not make a whit of difference as to the validity of my opinion. Or will you stand here and claim that she has not been using you all this time in order to feel special in her average Muggle home, and that she will not have you unless it is on her terms?"

"She is not wilfully turning her head away from her own faults! If you had the first clue as to what I've witnessed her go through this summer–"

"Yes, I imagine learning how to hold her head high in the face of her father's ruination of her family must have taken enormous strength of character."

Severus pulled back sharply; he'd not expected his mother to be on top of town gossip, and to hear her dismiss with one sentence Lily's struggle that he'd been privileged enough to witness and help her through in what little ways he could offer...

"Well, perhaps the stigma might teach her the value of things," his mother was saying, ignorant of or, more likely, ignoring Severus' shock, "because you have certainly failed at that, though I never expected any other outcome. People like her will never condescend to believe that people like us can teach them a single thing. But you are sixteen years old, and this has gone on long enough."

"You – _you_ – are casting that stone at her?!" The hypocrisy enraged him. "Is that it, Mother? You did not condescend to believe any such thing until your rebellion against your parents escaped your control and you had no other choice but to become one of _that_ class, so you cannot comprehend that she could do better than you? Or does your pride make you wish that I not do any better in my life than you and Father did in yours?"

His mother's face tightened, lips whitening to bloodlessness as she pinched them together in anger, nostrils flaring, and Severus felt a triumphant joy at having penetrated her façade, at having retaliated for the hurt she'd caused him.

"It is only your childish arrogance that dares say that," she spat, black eyes flashing. "Because if you were a parent, you would not even _think_ to conjecture such a thing as you've said about my feelings for your future."

"If Lily asked it of me, I would walk into the deepest circle of hell and back, and I would _still_ be better off than following _your_ feelings on my future!" Severus exclaimed, the sentiment burning through any control left to him, words like hot lava in his mouth, unstoppable and all-powerful. "It was Lily who taught me the purity of happiness, and it was thanks to Lily that I've learned how to preserve it instead of letting the hatefulness and anger rot it away, hatefulness and anger I learned _in this house_!"

" _Flowers and sunshine_ will not keep you going when your life becomes unbearable," Eileen said, in a low, controlled voice that bubbled with something Severus could not recognise, "anger and perseverance in your life course will. Tobias and I have taught you how to survive the unbearable, how to face the ugliness of life and never flinch. Perhaps it was a harsh lesson, and perhaps it never brought a smile to your face, but I would rather that you are alive and unhappy than dead with a smile on your face. And which lesson of these two was the one driving your actions downstairs, Severus? Which one?"

Swallowing compulsively, the tangy copper taste of blood scraping his throat raw, Severus looked down, feeling flayed alive by his mother's words and tone of voice, and gaze most of all.

If she loved him, then it was in a way that made his innards twist into knots and his heart lodge in his throat. Severus knew his father didn't love him; he'd wished and hoped so many times in his life that his mother still did, or that at least he could know one way or the other.

Now he found himself wishing that she didn't.

But his instinct, when fight failed him and flight beckoned, was to run to one place, one person, even when it was a place forbidden to him, even when she didn't want anything to do with him, and it was suddenly so overwhelming that he barely resisted it for the few seconds left to Eileen.

"You're right," he told his mother, "you taught me anger and perseverance. So really, it seems it's your fault, not Lily's or Dumbledore's, that I've chosen the ruin you see for me, because I'm too stubborn once I've made up my mind. And, Mother, I _have_ made up my mind. You should have intervened when you still had the chance; you're far too late now."

He fled his room through the window and over the pathetic, wilted tree in their back yard, leaving behind this mighty woman of his childhood shrunken and somehow crumpled in spite of the fact that his last sight of her was standing erect, immovable, perfectly still, in his dark little room, surrounded by things that meant more to her than they did to him these days, that told the story of the Severus Snape she believed him to be, or maybe wished him to be, and not the Severus Snape he now was.

* * *

James didn't quite understand how much the summer had escaped his control until Athenora walked somewhat hurriedly into his room, crossed it to reach his dressers and drawers, and began pulling out all of her stray clothes that had migrated into his room since they'd begun shagging. Having been reading _Quidditch Weekly_ , James was on his bed at the time and so got to stare in befuddlement at her for a long moment.

"What're you doing?"

"Packing," she replied distractedly. "I've just gotten word, Sophia and Christopher will be arriving tomorrow to pick me up, we're off to Vietnam."

"What, _tomorrow_?" he asked, sitting up in shock.

"Yes, they've got the international Portkeys with them, so it'll be just a short stop for them. Now that Mom's gone home, there isn't too much point for me to delay on my end, and they've finally sorted out their own affairs, too."

James' stomach plummeted somewhere under his bed, and he suddenly felt just a bit dizzy.

"Well, if they're travelling here all the way from America, would they want to stay the night?" he asked, helpless to grasp for something. He'd known she'd be going soon, of course, he was off for Hogwarts in just a short while as well, but this felt too sudden to process properly.

Athenora stopped in her movement and turned to look at him with something like regret in her eyes.

"That wouldn't be a good idea, Jimmy," she said, shaking her head slightly.

"It's a great idea!"

"No. No, you wouldn't want them staying under your roof, trust me on that."

"Why wouldn't I?"

Athenora opened her mouth, then closed it and shook her head. "You'll understand tomorrow when you met them. It'd just be a bad idea all around."

And so she left James sitting on his bed, feeling like he'd been slapped and not really sure why that was. She still came to him and they spent the night together, and there was a sense of quiet desperation in the air, one that, James realised later when she'd fallen asleep next to him, was why he thought of that night as the first time they truly made love, rather than just shagged.

Her friends arrived around noon the next day, on schedule. Athenora said her gratitudes and farewells to James' parents in the house before taking her luggage out by the front door, and both James and Sirius waited outside with her, and therefore got to see two young people arrive by Portkey – a boy and a girl. The boy was tall and gangly, with tousled, curly blonde hair and very dark blue eyes that, under almost white eyebrows, made him look all the more alien. The girl was shorter than Athenora, her black hair cut a boy's fashion, her clothes decidedly Muggle, with some sort of modified robe thrown over it like a coat.

As soon as they landed and regained their feet, the girl's eyes met Athenora's, and then suddenly there was a pop of Apparition and the blonde wasn't standing next to Sirius and James, but was on the other side of the front yard.

It felt a bit like watching a Bludger fly directly for his face and not having the sense to move away, seeing the two girls pull each other into a tight hug, seeing Athenora spin the other girl around and then clash their lips together for a kiss that was so filthy any English sensibilities would have demanded their owners be utterly appalled by the display. And it felt like it lasted for ages, the fiery intimacy between the two girls, who seemed rather desperate to absorb each other in whatever way was physically or magically possible. It felt like the rest of James' life, and all awareness utterly left his body, until he wasn't sure how he was still standing, how his legs hadn't given out on him.

When they pulled away, there were tear tracks on the other girl's cheeks, and Athenora's fingers gently wiping them away as she laughed. They kissed again, a short smack of lips on lips, before the blonde pulled away and turned to the third member of the group, whose utter lack of interest in the spectacle meant that he had spent the last however long studying James and Sirius.

"Chrissy," Athenora declared, and the boy sighed in a very put-upon way, but he turned to her and allowed her to hug him, even if he looked mostly like a Muggle light pole just standing there.

"You had sex with either one or both of those guys," the boy declared in a sharp American accent, looking quite pleased with himself. The brunette rolled her eyes, and Athenora smirked.

"I've missed you too."

"That's not what I said. I did not say that I missed you. I did not miss you."

"That's fine, I didn't expect you to. Come meet my hosts." Bags left where they'd been deposited – very large Muggle backpacks, James noted detachedly, two stuffed full to bursting, one deflated and empty – the three nineteen-year-olds walked over to the two sixteen-year-olds, the two girls holding tightly onto each other, the boy walking at some distance from them. "James Potter, who gifted me with a very pleasant summer, and his best friend, Sirius Black. Christopher Sellsworth, my oldest friend, and Sophia Williams, my girlfriend."

"Girlfriend?" Sirius burst out with a frown of disbelief on his face. "So you're a lezzo?!"

Sophia's nose wrinkled in disgust, and she gave Sirius the most pitying look James had ever seen on anyone's face. Athenora's response was only a blink.

"Actually, I'm bisexual, if you are aware of the meaning of that term," she replied calmly. "I had hoped to leave a bit longer impression on you with that blowjob, incidentally, but I suppose I'm not very surprised that's not been the case."

"So, what, you're a cheater in addition to fucking everything that walks on two legs and is in the correct age-group?"

"She does neither," Christopher got himself involved, looking at Sirius as if the dark-haired boy was a curious puzzle. "You are projecting because something has upset you. Why would Athenora and Sophia have upset you?" That actually sounded like an utterly honest question, as if the boy simply couldn't grasp anything out of his own deduction.

"My guess, because he's homophobic and we brought up some latent fears of his own possible homosexuality," Sophia noted, words cutting and hot where Athenora's look was cool and unperturbed. "Oh, let me guess, she got you into a threesome?"

Sirius' face lost all its colour. James' head swam.

"Oh, shush," Athenora told her girlfriend, planting a kiss on her cheek. "He's mostly upset because he had some sort of fantasy of me and Jimmy getting together; he has a very strong dislike for the girl Jimmy's in love with."

"Ah," Sophia declared, instantly relaxing. "Well, I hope you had fun with James, then?"

"Mmm, yes, quite a bit. How was your stay with your family?"

"It was nice; I caught up with some friends, too, Annelise and Robin, you remember them from two years ago, and my grandparents stayed with us for most of it, so I could justify not using magic." The girl grinned, a very attractive smile on her boyish features. "Mom was pissed off about it, which was a nice bonus. Got to remind her I'm not her freaking housekeeper just because I can do magic and they all have to muddle through with No-Maj methods of cleaning and cooking."

"I had a fight with my brother," the boy declared, as if they'd asked him about his summer, too – or as if he'd been taught to expect the question and wanted to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. "He refused to let me come with to Vietnam. I told him to stick his wand up his ass, since I'm legally an adult and he can't tell me what to do anymore."

"Did you really?" Athenora asked, clearly amused.

"Oh, yes. It would have been a very amusing sight, if only he'd ever listen to me."

"Your brother is insufferable," Sophia declared with a roll of her eyes. "You did good."

"Of course I did. I know how to speak with him." But the boy did seem to preen a bit at the praise. "Now can we take her bags while she delivers the news that she would never have broken up with you to stay here with some boy she met over the summer?"

Athenora met James' eyes, and the full weight of her words the previous day dropped inside him.

No. No, he would not have wanted either of those two under his roof.

James thought he might be sick.

"Yes, we can. And I know you know how to use tact when you want," Sophia told Christopher, passing him one of Athenora's bags while grabbing the other herself. "You're just stirring the pot now." She tugged on the handle of the bag to make the boy move, and in passing planted a possessive kiss on Athenora's lips.

"I am not!" Off Sophia's look, Christopher relented, looking put out. "How did you figure it out? I thought I was being very convincing this time."

They continued in that vein, with the girl explaining social cues to the boy in a calm, even tone, and James, Sirius and Athenora stood in silence for a moment, watching them as they began transferring all of Athenora's stuff into the empty third backpack with precise wand motions.

Then Athenora turned back, meeting Sirius' eyes first and James tore his eyes back down to her, his heart hammering in his chest painfully.

"If you would go be pissed at me inside the house?" the strawberry blonde asked Sirius with a flick of her eyes towards the manor entrance. "I'd like a private word with James."

"So you could toy with him some more?" Sirius spat out, and in response, Athenora gave him a condescending look.

"James and I both knew what this was when it started. If it's anyone's fault for his feelings being hurt, it's yours for encouraging him to forget it. Par for the course with you, naturally; all your friendships are always about you and never about the other person."

"And what is that–"

"You wanted me to replace Lily Evans, because you hate her for having a straighter moral compass than I do and for being vocal about her expectations of others, naïve as that is."

"Hey, that's not–"

"In the meantime," the girl spoke over him, raising her voice to drown his out, "you never once wondered what sort of life I led, and what my own wishes would be. You also didn't give a shit about James' feelings,"

"Like you'd kno–"

"If you had, you wouldn't have muddied the waters for him and caused him to doubt what I'd be willing to give him, and thus needlessly and cruelly raised his expectations."

"I didn't do _any_ –"

"Of course you did. You did the exact same thing with Remus, by belittling his fears and making him feel unsafe, two things which can be beyond debilitating to werewolves, and when he objected to your careless treatment of him, you rejected him, simply because you disliked that he disagreed with you and had the guts to tell you to your face."

"You shut y–"

"And Chrissy was completely right in saying that you're projecting your self-loathing on others, no doubt because you're utterly emotionally stunted and don't see any problem with only ever caring about yourself."

"How d–"

"Now _take a hike_ , Sirius, because James deserves our last conversation for the summer to be _private_."

"If you think that I'd–" Sirius took an aggressive move towards Athenora.

"Sirius," James snapped, making the other boy freeze in his step. "Leave us alone."

"Prongs–"

"Please."

Huffing, anger distorting his face, Sirius did as he was bid, and only when he was inside the house did James turn back to the girl that he'd spent the summer with, the girl that he hadn't noticed he'd developed feelings for.

"You knew I wouldn't stay, Jimmy," Athenora said, voice back to its usual calm. She didn't shy away from eye contact, though James was hard-pressed to keep it on his side. "I felt it was understood that this was only casual sex with no strings attached, but perhaps I should have been clearer on that point."

"No, I..." his voice deserted him, and he swallowed. "It was that for me too. I'm in love with Lily, not you."

It somehow sounded like hollow platitudes to his ears, meant only for him, because Athenora, as usual, saw right through the obfuscation.

The look of pity on her face was shaming, and James felt his cheeks flood with warmth. He felt like an utter imbecile, like an inexperienced child with no self-control, and he wanted to hate her for making him feel this way. He _really_ wanted to, because his chest hurt and his throat burned and his legs were barely holding him up.

"Soph and I have been together for three years, and I don't see that changing any time soon."

"So, she doesn't, um, mind, when you..." Floundering, James shut his mouth.

Athenora lifted her eyebrow. "We don't keep secrets from each other. Beyond that is our business."

"Right. Yeah, no, I get it."

"Do you?"

"I... yeah. I mean, it's not like... it's your life." One that, in the end, she'd barely shared at all with James, and he'd been too blind to see that he wasn't wanted in any real part of it.

He'd only been a fling, and he'd known it, but somehow he'd let that knowledge slip his mind.

"Good," Athenora replied, moving a step closer into his personal space. "Would you like one last kiss? I've been wondering whether you offer that to the girls you have fun with while you wait for Lily Evans to notice you. I usually do; no need to end a bit of great fun on a sour note, don't you agree?"

Then she wrapped her arm around his shoulders and tugged him down into a deep kiss, one that clearly stated this was never going to happen again, and James felt his stomach turning even as he gave into it, unable not to take what she was offering even though he mostly just wanted to hurl all his breakfast from the emotional whiplash and the soul-deep pain that he didn't know what to do with, or even how to classify.

Perhaps he'd been stupid enough to fall in love with her after all.

And, watching her walk away, back to be claimed by Sophia Williams in the crudest way possible – because that was what it was, the other girl letting _him_ know that she'd won when James hadn't even known he'd been competing with her, hadn't even properly figured out he'd _wanted_ to compete with her, a Muggle-born lesbian of all things, about as far from himself as one could get – he found himself dizzy with anger and disappointment and hurt, and yet unable to escape her last words to him.

He now knew exactly how those girls had felt, when he'd wooed them and seduced them and had fun with them and then broken up with them, leaving them to pick up the pieces of their broken hearts and being annoyed with them for not understanding that theirs was only ever going to be a brief affair.

As the group of three grabbed hold of the Portkey and twisted out of his sight, James stumbled back to collapse on the front steps, light-headed and fighting for breath, feeling more out of control than ever in his life, utterly disbelieving that this was actually happening to him, that this was his life. His thoughts refused to coalesce into anything concrete, fragmented feelings and beliefs floating through his mind and out of his grasp, so that when he felt someone's hand on his shoulder, he jumped to his feet in fright and whirled around.

Sirius' pale eyes underneath frowning eyebrows met his own, and for a moment James couldn't quite look away as Athenora's last words to Sirius echoed in his head, muddied waters and mistaken assumptions.

Breathing heavily, James stumbled past his best friend into the house and up the stairs, ignoring Sirius' attempts to get him to respond, utterly incapable of dealing with anything just this moment. He shut the door of his room firmly behind him and dropped down onto his own bed that still smelled of the girl who'd just left, and for one crazed moment, James wasn't quite sure that all of it was even real at all.

He couldn't help himself – he started laughing and laughing, the hilarity of the whole thing only enhancing the out-of-body experience. He laughed until tears started running down his nose, and then, when the laughter tapered off, the tears continued to flow in silence, so that he was barely even aware of them.

In the end, he found himself curled up on his bed, the shock wrung out of him with his tears, and only one thing truly stood out in his mind as he slipped into numbing unconsciousness of sleep – last night, the quiet desperation hadn't been in the air between them at all. It had just been in his heart.

* * *

Lying awake in her bed at some stupidly late hour – or early, depending on how one looked at it – Lily found herself feeling angry all over again, though she'd managed to calm herself down some by the end of the evening, because insomnia was not something that she knew how to handle, _could not_ handle, and Severus was causing it yet again.

Sometimes she felt like she wanted to wring his neck, just to get some peace of mind and stop feeling all this tangled up mess of things that kept her strung up like a violin string. God, but she _hated_ feeling this way, hated it from the bottom of her heart.

And the rain was beating down, _now_ of all the bloody times this summer, stupid wind rustling the tree in front of her window so that it was smacking the pane with a branch every once in a while, bringing her back to wakefulness if she managed to doze off even a little bit. Sodding crazy weather this bloody miserable summer.

She turned towards the wall, and the branch scraped against the window, pat-pat-pat of rain banging like tiny gongs in her head and that was the last straw – furious, Lily jumped out of bed to do something about this, because this was intolerable. She had no clue what she was going to do – she couldn't use magic to bind the tree in place or cut off the branch – but she was going to at the very least open the window and yell at it, just to release some of her pent-up frustration, even if she got drenched in the deluge.

The hunched figure was barely indistinguishable in the dark, would have slipped her notice had it not jumped in shock when she screamed into the storm, voice muffled by her pinched lips. Clenching her fists on the windowsill angrily, she leaned out.

"What the hell are you doing here?" she hissed at him. "Why aren't you in bed?"

Severus scrambled to sit up straighter on the branch, nearly slipping in the process, and the light of their back porch threw an eerie, weak glow on him. Lily gasped softly – his drenched white shirt was liberally sprayed with red.

"Lily, I–"

"Get in," she ordered, pulling back.

"What?" he shot back in a surprised whisper.

"I said, get in the room! And don't you dare slip and fall!"

Scrambling over the branches, Severus did as she'd commanded, and she took careful note of the fact that he was favouring his right side. She grabbed hold of his arm under his armpit as he clumsily tried to step over the windowsill, and kept hold of it as he managed to find his footing. Then she manhandled him onto a chair in the corner and turned on her desk lamp, tugging it too sharply to shine on his face.

His nose was completely swollen, splotched red and purplish, and a part of his eye was starting to darken into an obvious bruise. To top that off, he had a shallow cut on the side of his jaw that had obviously been bleeding and had not been cleaned properly, on the same side as the one he was favouring. To complete the look were wads of toilet paper stuffed into his large nostrils.

"Lily–"

"Shut up."

Careful to be as quiet as possible, Lily snuck out of her room in search of the first-aid kit they kept in the bathroom, as well as some towels for both herself and him. On the way, she slipped into her father's bedroom and, very careful not to wake him, pulled the bottommost drawer of his dresser open just enough to pinch a pair of pyjama pants and pull them out.

When she returned, Severus was in exactly the same pose as when she'd left him, dripping water all over her chair and carpet, droplets falling one after the other from the ends of his roped hair, and his half-bewildered, half-hesitant look was all the more obvious for now being lighted up in the yellow glow of the lamp.

Taking a moment to push her fury down enough to not add to his hurt, Lily dropped a towel onto his head and rubbed the excess water out of his hair, smacking his hands away when he moved to take over from her. Then, leaving the now sodden towel on his head, she gingerly pulled the toilet paper out of his nose, vigilant about continued bleeding. Luckily, there was none, so she carefully checked the whole length of his nose, pressing lightly to see if the cartilage was broken.

"It's fine," he said, voice nasal.

"I said shut up."

His teeth clicked shut at the speed with which he closed his mouth, and he let her assure herself that there really was nothing broken inside; he'd had his aquiline nose broken so many times already, she didn't think his visage could tolerate much more.

Digging through the first-aid kit, she found a disinfecting solution to clean the broken skin of the nose and the cut on his jaw, and set about treating his injuries.

"What was it this time?" she asked once she'd removed all the excess blood and Severus had winced a few times at the sting.

"Nothing."

"You promised me you'd avoid him." One of those promises of childhood that Lily was learning not to believe anymore, like his promise that her Muggle heritage didn't matter, or her promise that they'd be best friends forever.

"Yeah, well, didn't think you'd care," he muttered, and she wanted to either reply with a cutting, snide response of her own or slap him and shake him for it.

"You provoked him, didn't you?" she asked accusingly, and his flinch was all the confirmation she needed. "Are you a complete idiot, Severus? We're going to Hogwarts on Wednesday! You know this will raise questions from people you don't want to be asking questions! Why in the world would you want to do this to yourself?!"

He was refusing to look at her, his black eyes trained somewhere near her hip, and Lily grabbed his chin, giving it a slight tug so that he looked up at her.

"What made you choose to pick a fight with your father, Severus?"

He looked down, expression shattered, before turning his gaze back on her and shuttering himself away before her eyes.

"I didn't come here for you to interrogate and manhandle me, Lily."

"No? Then why did you come?" she challenged.

"Because I had nowhere else to go, and this seemed as good a place as any. And what gives you the right to treat me like this, huh? You're done with me, remember?"

"What?"

"You said you couldn't look at me anymore. I suppose it's easier now that I'm all banged up, is that it?" he almost growled at her, voice filled with impotent fury.

Yet he hadn't moved away from her hold, or even tried to create some distance between them in spite of his words; it was how Lily knew those were just empty words, meant to cut and hurt just because he himself was feeling cut and hurt. She was a bit too angry just then for them to do anything but stroke the flames of that anger.

"Severus, stop talking horseshit," she told him sharply. "And don't you _dare_ judge me for being disgusted with what you'd told me today, don't you _dare_! I saw the aftermath of your actions first-hand. I heard Holland screaming like his brain was liquefying in his skull. And on top of that, you'd lied to me about it all this time, while everything was going down with my parents, while I was trying to make amends for my failures as your best friend."

"So why the hell are you cleaning me up, then?"

"Because you're my best friend, and you're hurt!" she exclaimed and almost winced when she realised how loud she'd been. "You're my best friend," she continued in a lower register, "and you did a stupid thing, and I'm not going to let you sit out in the rain on a _tree_ for the whole night with you face busted and your wounds untreated. What do you take me for?!"

He opened his mouth, closed it, blinked at her, then frowned, his whole face contorting in what looked like complete befuddlement.

"What the hell are you even _talking_ about, Lily?"

"What the hell are _you_ talking about, Severus?" she retorted, though it was clear to her that she was the one who actually understood what was going on here. "Because you've obviously completely blown everything out of proportion!"

"I've–" he gaped at her a bit more, and Lily propped her hands on her hips and waited him out with a pointed look while he processed the sheer idiocy of his own thinking. "So, you're not... we're still friends?"

" _Yes_ , we're still friends!" she replied, utterly exasperated with him.

"I don't... I don't understand. You're still angry with me, but you're... you're acting like–"

"Severus." She opened her mouth, then closed it and took a deep breath that didn't help at all, but at least stopped something very bad from escaping her mouth. "You tell me if I've gotten something wrong; interrupt me, please. This morning, you made me angry and I removed myself from you to get some breathing space, because it's a good tactic that's served me well in the past few months so that I don't say something I regret later. Over the course of the afternoon, you've worked yourself up into such a state that you've convinced yourself I was breaking off our friendship again, so you went and got yourself beat up because you thought it'd make you feel better, that being beaten on by your father would make your pain at supposedly ruining our friendship again feel less, which I'm assuming it didn't. Then you came to sit outside my window on the tree because you thought that's the only way you can see me again, from a distance? Have I gotten something wrong?"

His expression morphed from confusion to shocked relief to shame and embarrassment, finally settling on what Lily thought was self-anger, though she couldn't quite be sure.

"I also had a row with my mother," he muttered, and Lily exhaled loudly in exasperation, turning away from him to dig through her already packed trunk for that bruise cream she had in her toiletries purse; with how easily she bruised, it was a godsend, really. It took her a minute or two to find it, but when she did, she took Severus' chin in the hand that she was holding the cream jar with, and with the other she carefully smeared a generous amount of it over his nose and under his eyes.

"I am _furious_ with you, and this shite just makes me that much angrier," she told him sharply, "because I thought I'd proven to you over the last two and a half months that I am trying to understand you, and I'm trying to be the best friend I should have been two years ago, and I thought we were doing so much better now, and then you pull a stunt like this because you have zero confidence in me! So either you don't trust me, after everything that's happened this summer, or you think so little of me that you believe I'd be _that_ fickle, which makes me think you don't know me in the least!"

"That's not – I don't think of you like that – Lily, I'm not – I _trust_ you, I do!"

"Then why the hell did you presuppose that I'd cut you off the first time you made me truly angry?" she snapped.

"Because this proves that I'm just like them," he finally replied, the words seemingly almost wrenched out of him against his will. "It proves that you'd been right about me all along, and you'd already made yourself clear about it, about what you think of me and my association with the Dark Lord's supporters, it proves _everything_ that had ruined our friendship last June!"

Her heart sank when she read through the lines – the issue wasn't about trust, not the way she'd interpreted it; it was about self-perception.

"And you think that the fact this is what made you go to Dumbledore and become his spy proves _nothing_ to me?" she replied, stuck between angry and despairing. "You think it makes no difference to me that you had felt as disgusted about it as I'd expect a genuinely good person to feel? That it wasn't something you'd been willing to do, and that you'd gone into it on false pretences?"

"But – Lily, you were so angry with me – are _still_ angry with me about it!"

"It's not one or the other, Severus! Emotions aren't exclusory of each other! I can be proud of you for seeing the wrong in it _and_ be angry with you for having done it in the first place! And I can damn well be angry with you that it took _Dumbledore_ suggesting it for you to admit it to me, after you'd _lied to my face_ when I'd asked you about it back when it had happened, but also be thankful enough that you'd finally told me that I wouldn't do something I'd regret later, like reacting without thinking and actually doing what you thought I'd done! Why do you even think I had to get away, than to process it before deciding how we can proceed from this point?!"

"I–"

He hadn't understood this, probably hadn't even thought of it, Lily saw it so obviously on his face. For Severus, emotions were something that was to be put out of the way and dealt with one at a time; he'd spent so much time cloaking everything with misery and living in his own anger, that other emotions were too feeble to break through this and make him reconsider any given situation. It was why he'd called her 'Mudblood' back in June, because his anger at what Potter had done to him and implied about his manhood in front of half the school had been so absolutely eclipsing that it hadn't even registered with him properly whom he'd been hurting back as he'd lashed out in the only way left to him. Lily hadn't really grasped the magnitude of this before now, and it was leaving her feeling shell-shocked, because it was a terrible way to live, especially if, like Severus, one had so few good emotions to combat the bad ones.

"Have we cleared this up, now?" she asked him, combativeness giving way to authoritativeness. "That you'll actually contain yourself and give me the benefit of the doubt when this happens next time? Like I've been containing myself and giving you a chance to explain practically everything that's come up in conversation since June?"

He licked his lips and nodded, and his spine lost its rigidity as he truly relaxed for what had to be the first time in hours. Satisfied, Lily found some bandaid in the first aid kit and began carefully taping up the cuts on his face, thoughts busy with the day's events that she was now able, for the first time since they'd met up this morning, to consider in a calmer and more collected manner.

The self-perception issue Severus had revealed to her just now, there was more to it than that. The more she thought about it, the more obvious it was becoming to her. And not just that Severus apparently thought the worst of himself to the point he couldn't even imagine others seeing anything different. No, this went back the whole summer, she was sure of it, and perhaps even beyond.

He'd been uncharacteristically attentive this summer, and as much as Lily had both appreciated and needed it through the ordeal of her parents' separation, it certainly wasn't very much alike to the Severus of before, who'd often been blinded by his own perspective and rarely interested in actually trying to understand her point of view. She'd thought it had meant that he was invested in repairing their friendship as much as she had, but with what he'd just told her, the far likelier explanation was that his desperation to not lose her and their relationship had driven him to act in a way he'd thought would most appeal to her. Certainly Slytherin of him, but ultimately problematic on multiple levels.

Putting aside the most direct problem of his behaviour resulting in them building their friendship on false foundations, acting in this way most certainly didn't come naturally to Severus, so Lily had no doubt that however he'd managed to keep himself focused on doing everything right by her, it must have tired him out immensely. No doubt that kind of emotional exhaustion had played into his mistaken conclusions regarding their fight today, and while Lily certainly hoped he'd continue to act like this, that he'd let it actually sink in and hopefully help him develop his empathy in a more healthy way, Lily couldn't ignore the fact that pretending even with her to be something he wasn't meant that Severus likely thought there was no place or person with whom he was safe enough to just be.

What saddened her the most was that he had done everything right throughout the summer, but the first time he hadn't, he'd not only assumed the worst, he'd taken it as granted, so much so that he'd completely skipped over doubt and gone straight into self-destruction. Certainly, it meant that her responsibility towards him was much greater than the level under which she'd been operating so far. Given what Severus was going to be doing in just a few days, the danger he was going to be putting himself in, Lily was going to need to re-evaluate her own behaviour when the two of them found themselves in conflict.

Severus most certainly needed to work on his self-image and self-esteem, but if Lily wanted to truly be his friend and confidante through the times to come, then she was going to have to stay constantly aware of the fact that he needed more emotional reassurance than she herself did, and that it was on her to provide it, because in choosing her and the Light, in showing her just how important she truly was to him, Severus had given up on other potential support systems he might have had in his housemates, defective and dangerous though Lily had found them.

"Severus, this weird insistence on submissiveness and self-flagellation that you have when it comes to our friendship has to stop."

Her words immediately made him bristle up in defensiveness, which Lily had fully expected.

"It's not–"

"Yes, it is," she interrupted him. "I don't know if this is something that you've started doing after my hysterical breakdown before the summer hols, or if this is something you'd been doing from the start and just stopped when we started arguing so much, but you've been doing it practically all summer long, Severus, and it needs to stop. It's not natural to you, and it's doing more damage than good to our friendship, as well, because it's causing us both to misread situations, and badly. We can't afford that going forward."

"It was my fault," Severus responded, his mind clearly still stuck on the previous conversation thread. "That you thought you weren't–"

"No, it wasn't," she cut him off, some more puzzle pieces slotting themselves in her mind. She _really_ needed to take the time and re-examine all of their interactions going back at least six months, because if this evening was proving something, it was that Severus' inability to handle complex emotions was leaving him stuck on things Lily had long moved on from, such as her hysterics just before the summer hols. And with the way he was putting it right now, she had a feeling that he was looking at that particular incident through the lens of guilt, which was no doubt only playing into his fears regarding their relationship and, she supposed, his potential negative influence on her.

Lily resigned herself to having this particular conversation now, when there were so many other things to be resolved. She had a feeling it should be said before Hogwarts imposed secrets and deception on their relationship, and it was also clear he needed to hear it, for more than one reason. "You were saying something that you'd erroneously thought of as the truth, and I was already too upset with everything else to actually stop and think about it. You saying that I'd taught you friendship is about exploitation is not what made me think I'd been in it just because of what I could get from you, so stop thinking that."

"Then what did?"

She shook her head; the truth was that she _knew_ she'd acted selfishly and exploitatively towards him, and realising it had been unconscious on her part didn't change facts, but speaking of that truth would mean speaking of the reasons it existed, and that would lead them into a discussion that Lily – and she suspected, after their fight, Severus as well – was neither prepared for mentally nor in the right place to have emotionally. "My own attempts to adjust to the fact that I'd been wrong about you and your motivations for months, and that I'd not tried to figure out what had been going on for that whole time when I'd known something was different from the status quo. I'd come to some conclusions about this beforehand, and I took your assertion as confirmation of them, when I should have also thought about why you'd see it in this way apart from me. So you can stop beating yourself up about this, Severus, because I don't regret that conversation in the least."

"Don't you?"

"No, I don't," she reasserted. "Our friendship was in pieces, Severus, and we _both_ needed something to make us rethink what we mean to each other and how we can put the pieces back together. I needed something to shake me out of my mindset, because you'd been disappointing my expectations at every turn to the point where I'd stopped _having_ any, just so that it wouldn't hurt when you'd yet again prove me wrong, and that's on you, but it's on me too that I'd practically given up on you ever proving me wrong. I had been this close to giving you an ultimatum between those boys and me so many times, Severus, but I hadn't, because I'd been afraid that you'd choose them over me. What does that tell you about where I'd been mentally at the beginning of the year about you?"

The devastation shone from his eyes as Lily's best friend licked his lips and pulled a strand of greasy hair out of his eyes.

"I don't... blame you."

"I should hope not!" she couldn't help herself from retorting, a bit too sharply. "You were willingly spending time with a group of people who believe that they get to judge me based on the fact that my parents don't have magic. You were turning a deaf ear to my complaints and my pleadings and my yelling and every other way I could think of to get you to understand that your stances _were_ _hurting me_ , because you'd told me once upon a time that it didn't matter, but you were starting to believe their shite, you were starting to act like them and to justify them doing to others what Potter and Black had been doing to you for years, all the while trying to get me to despise those two for doing what your friends had been doing. So I certainly hope you don't feel like you have any right to blame or not blame me for not being able to deal any longer with what you were putting me through!"

His face twisted into a grimace and he looked down, hair concealing his bruised face from her eyes. Lily sighed, letting go her justified anger on this point. Getting angry was so far today only serving to distract her from her point and create more conflict. She needed to stay calm, even if forcibly.

"My point, Severus, is that I had been reaching a point where I had no will left to constantly confront the issues, or to pretend that they weren't there, either. In February, I'd been reaching a point where the anger and disappointment and exhaustion at what was to me essentially banging my head against the wall when it came to our friendship were destroying everything good I'd ever felt for you. When you told me about the Whomping Willow incident was the first time in a long time that I'd felt anger _for_ you, not _at_ you, and it was the first time in a long time that I'd truly felt again the way I'd felt when we were kids, when I hadn't been adopting your stance on friendship in my interactions with you. You spent months acting strangely, and I just took it without question, just went with it and not once did I ask myself why you were acting in this way, because... because I was afraid of even more disappointment. I was so afraid of you hurting me and leaving me, that I'd dug my feet into my own perceptions and clung to them in spite of everything that should have gotten me to reconsider. So yes, of course I don't regret it; I was becoming like my mother and Petunia, with their rigidity and their inability to change, I'd formed an opinion and I would not see that you were changing, which is exactly what Petunia is doing with me, and what my mother was doing with my father. I don't want to be like that, Severus, not ever, and if it hurts to realise it and to start thinking about it and start doing something to prevent it, then it hurts, but I won't ever regret going through that pain if it means I'm going to actually like myself in ten or twenty years, and that I won't wake up one day regretting practically my whole life like my dad's done."

She held his gaze until he nodded; whether he could accept her explanation at face value or not, she didn't know, but she hoped he would nonetheless, because it was the truth. And it felt good to hope in their friendship and feel some level of surety the hope wasn't pointless; she hadn't felt like that in a long time when it came to her best friend.

"And about your behaviour this summer – I _really_ appreciate it, because I needed you and you were there for me start to finish. But if we're going to really build something strong between us, in this friendship, then you have to let me see your bad sides, too, Severus, like I've shown you mine. I can deal with the bad, and I'm mostly aware of it anyway, so trying to hide it from me now is somewhat pointless; what I can't deal with are lies and platitudes that make me feel like an idiot, or like I don't matter enough to be taken into consideration. Especially now, with all the lying and pretending we're going to be doing in a few days, it's more important to me that I can rely on you to not prevaricate even if I won't like what I hear, including being told that I am not allowed to know something. And I need you to trust in me, that I won't write you off because things you've done and will do might horrify me. Please."

Suddenly afraid to know whether her words had reached him, Lily turned back to her bed and pulled out one of the big boxes she kept under it, where all her spare blankets and pillows and bedsheets were. Pulling out some of each, she dropped them on her own bed, before picking up the second of three towels along with the pyjama bottoms and tossing them into Severus' lap.

"You're going to have to sleep on the floor, I can't get the mattress from the other room without waking everyone," she told him.

"All right," he agreed, placing the towel and pyjama pants on her desk carefully, before frowning slightly. "You didn't bring a shirt."

"I was a bit preoccupied with not waking my dad up. You'll have to deal with it."

Severus acquiesced with only a nod of his head, though his abortive step towards her made her eyes snap up to meet his. The black orbs were swimming with insecurity.

"Lily... where – where do we stand? I don't – I'm not sure –"

Rubbing a hand over her face, Lily sighed.

"I don't quite know. I'm still angry with you about everything, and I have to find a way of getting over it. And Hogwarts will be hell. God, it never ends." She exhaled and dropped onto her bed. "I need some kind of time out, I think. I'm so bloody exhausted by everything that happened the last six months."

"I am afraid there isn't really time for that," he replied quietly, taking a seat next to her hesitantly and relaxing minutely when she didn't pull away.

"I know." Merlin, but she didn't want to risk ruining what she and Severus had rebuilt between them this summer – it was one of only two good things that had come out of it, one of the two things which had carried her through all the hardships. "Maybe... maybe a few days of distance aren't a bad idea; just until we get to Hogwarts, until we're sure I won't give us up. Some good can come out of this mess."

"But you will forgive me?" Severus asked, and the desperate hope in his voice pierced her heart almost too deeply. She laced her fingers through his and laid her head on his shoulder, her forehead resting on his Adam's apple, where she could feel him swallow.

"Yes," she promised. "I haven't yet, but I will."

For a brief moment, she felt him lean slightly into her, felt him brush the crown of her head with his nose and lips and chin in a whisper of a touch, making her light up like a furnace under her skin suddenly, before he pulled away and stood up, beginning to unbutton his shirt with shaky fingers. Lily turned away from him, as much to give him some privacy as to hide her flaming cheeks and galloping heart, instead busying herself with spreading the two blankets on the floor next to her bed to make it softer, before shaking out the sheet over them and dropping the pillow down. Then she silently climbed back up into her bed, while Severus padded on bare feet to the window to squeeze water out of his clothes, and in the yellow light of the lamp, Lily could see the slowly developing bruises on the right side of his torso. Frowning, she leaned forward for a better look and caught the wince on his face as he spread his wet clothes on her chair.

"How bad is it?"

"It's just a bruise like any other," he responded dismissively. "It'll be fine in a couple of days; he smashed his hand into the wall and was too pained to kick properly."

" _Severus_."

Swallowing the horror at the casualness with which he'd said those words as well as their meaning, Lily blinked away the moisture in her eyes. If there was one thing Severus' pride could hardly stand, it was pity.

"As you said, it was my own damn fault," he replied, voice that little bit on the harsh side as he switched off the desk lamp, plunging them and the room back into darkness. "I was a fool, and I went looking for trouble. A little pain in my side is nothing."

She could hear him shuffling as he sat down on the ground.

"And your mother?"

"She was trying to force me to think of an issue the way she does, and I wouldn't let her. We argued. It's not important."

She wanted to ask more, and swallowed the words instead as she listened to him rustling the sheets as he settled into the make-shift bed. He was evading the topic obviously enough that Lily knew further prying would get her nothing, and ultimately, there was little to nothing she could offer him when it came to Eileen Snape. Severus' relationship with his mother was still just as much a mystery to Lily as it had been seven years ago.

"Lily, about tomorrow..."

Ah, yes, tomorrow. Manchester and her dad's flat and forty-eight hours of the two of them together.

"I'll stay in Cokeworth," he said quietly.

"Perhaps that would be best."

"I'm sorry."

"I know." After a beat of silence, she offered: "Night."

"Good night."

His voice followed her into a fitful sleep, but it was a sleep nonetheless.

* * *

 **A/N:** This concludes Part II, Growth, of The Path Not Tread. Like previously, there will be a short Interlude to fully close it out, and after posting that (I'll aim for next weekend), the story will once again go on hiatus. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to write seriously in the last half-year or so, as I had just started my PhD project, and that's a full-time employment kind of work in the field of molecular biology, so I had to focus on that transition. I am, however, at the moment back to proper writing speed and am using all of my spare time to write Part III (called 'Choice'), which will begin with them all returning to Hogwarts, and will once again bring the storylines back into intersection after what was relatively separate trajectories in this part. I hope I can finish the first draft of Part III in the next several months, though I can't say how long it'll take me to be ready to post new chapters. What I _can_ promise is that I am not abandoning this story for a second, and I hope that when the next part of this mammoth is ready, you'll be excited to continue the journey with me.


	35. Fourth Interlude: The Disowned Mother

**Fourth Interlude: The Disowned Mother**

 _Severus is back in his room, finally; your son is back under your roof._

 _Yours no longer, if he's to be believed, the bloody foolish wretch of a boy._

 _Peel the valerian root, focus on the thickness of the slices. Do not let yourself get distracted, can't afford it. And oh, he'll regret that little stunt of his, see if he won't after you're through with him. Dumping all of Tobias' alcohol, as if money grows on trees, when he gets to waltz off to school with a smile on his face, into the clutches of that bloody sorry excuse of a wizard, like every Merlin-blasted idiotic boy who thought there was anything_ noble _and_ right _about dying for other people's power grabs and nebulous, non-existent things such as freedom and equality, and believing such utter rot as that war generals give a shite about lowly soldiers they sacrifice for their own agendas and pretty, popular socialites give two sods about unkempt loners with hearts in their eyes._

 _Do_ not _think about Aidan. Do_ not _summon spirits long laid to rest, you know no good comes of it._

 _Except that's easier said than done, isn't it, when Severus is determined to follow in his path. Blasted, thrice-damned idealistic Prince blood; if only Tobias' heritage would have rubbed off on him more, then maybe you'd have managed to keep your boy from making the biggest mistake of his life._

 _Or maybe you're just kidding yourself; maybe instead of Dumbledore, it'd be Voldemort. Did you really think you could keep him? You? After everything you've gone through, everything you've done?_

 _Mother was right; it's only now that you've got Severus, that you understand the pain of parenthood, the shackles of it. Wouldn't have made a difference back then, of course, and there's no regret for the past, because time has only given you clarity about their depravity as parents, but by Merlin, don't you sometimes wish you'd let Tobias convince you that you'd both be better off not having children._

 _Foolish, ungrateful boy. If only it would be as easy to straighten him out as wringing his ear and getting him away from that little trollop. If he knew... but that's never going to happen. Burying the past was hard enough the first time, it's not getting dug up again, not even for your only child. He'd turn a deaf ear to it anyway, the way he's always turned a deaf ear to all the rest of the things you tried to teach him._

 _Yes, Tobias may not have been the best choice in a husband, and most certainly not the best in a father, but Severus does not know the true depths of abusive families, the way that it can rot you from the inside. At least there have never been any lies told to him under this roof; at least he's always known who his parents are, for good and even more for ill. What else would a Slytherin need, to make their life acceptable?_

 _It's that Evans girl who puts these ideas in his head. That she's gotten her claws into him has been obvious for years, yes, but it's always seemed like puppy love, and you know the exact difference between that and true love, couldn't have imagined the former transforming into the latter– No, don't lie to yourself; you thought you'd have enough time to wean him off it before it happened. You know perfectly well how slippery that slope is, how much luck it takes to step off it before it's too late, if there's no outside intervention._

 _He'd rather go to the depths of hell and back for her than listen to his mother. Foolish, idiotic boy, thinking he's invented melodramatic obsessive teenaged love. Oh, but admit it, Eileen, it worries you so much because you know exactly what he's feeling. That boy is a chip off the old block, and you know he will crash and burn in the worst ways. At least you had sense knocked into you in your youth with enough time to realise your own emotional flaws before you made a mistake of that proportion. At least you went into that kind of love he's feeling with your eyes mostly open. At least you're not deluding yourself about the man you've chosen, or the reasons why there is no other option for you._

 _Severus is only sixteen years old, and restraint is not in his blood; you should have known better, Eileen. You should have put a stop to it back when there was still time, instead of so foolishly trusting that the social environment of Hogwarts would do your work for you, and relying on your own ability to read him properly to monitor it to its inevitable conclusion._

 _Merlin take it all, how_ had _you miscalculated so badly? You've known what type the Evans girl is since you first saw her on the playground of their primary, after Severus had come home from playtime bursting at his sullen, quiet seams with stories of another wizarding child. The social butterfly, the little queen bee, the type who thinks she could never be wrong and that the rest of the world is there for her to bestow her blessed graces on and be grateful for it, too. Certainly, that's exactly how she's treated Severus since the moment they became friends. That kind of self-entitlement grates in the worst ways, has since Hogwarts, people who think that those of lower social or economic status were put on this Earth to serve and bow to them, like house-elves. And what grates even more is watching those less fortunate actually accept this as a given, accept it as if they are lucky, even, to be treated as such._

 _Muggles may not be any different from wizardfolk in this respect, but at least there is comfort in the vastness of the Muggle world, in the anonymity that comes with it. But that's what you get for thinking you could escape into your small self-made world, Eileen – turning around and realising that your own son has become the worst kind of offender, and with the gall to call you a hypocrite over it, too. If only Tobias had not been so angered over the magic, Severus would have been homeschooled and this whole blasted thing could have been avoided._

 _But that's the one you've earned for yourself fair and square, you don't get to weep bitterly over the consequences, no matter how much you might feel like doing so. No, what you get to do is deal with the fact that your son thinks if he's only good enough, he could somehow earn Lily Evans' love, as if girls like her ever look at boys like him except for a bit of comfort when it suits them and no one else is around. You get to watch yet another boy you love march off into yet another bloody war with rose-tinted glasses, and you get to know that you were not good enough for either of them in comparison to those charismatic, self-centred people that had ensnared them in their nets. If this isn't proof that history only ever repeats itself, then nothing is. And you certainly invited it on yourself from the very first moment you held him in your arms and decided to name him Severus – you know why you chose that name, and it had nothing to do with the descriptiveness of it._

 _It hurts in a different way this time around, though, doesn't it? You've hardened too much over the years, been made to, under the grind of life's failed expectations and bitter resentment to those who are beyond the reach of it. Could have actually done something this time, couldn't you've, and why hadn't you? Why_ had _you let that connection between Severus and the Evans girl go for so long unchecked?_

 _That there is no good answer to this question is what burns. No good answer except complacency and the failed belief that you know how the world of secondary school works, because you'd lived it. No, that one is an unacceptable mistake that cannot be forgiven. What's worse is that you'd been_ convinced _that the Evans girl had been growing distant for the past several years, because Severus, for all his increasing skill in misdirection and concealment of his thoughts and emotions, had still been projecting it clearly enough for you to read. Lily Evans had been leaving him behind, just as you'd predicted she would, as Severus had made it clear in his sparse letters over the school year, in his quietly intense fury at home and his bitter desperation at winning her time over the summer, even his silly spats with the elder Evans girl, Petunia._

 _So what had changed in the span of one school semester, between one holiday period and the next? What had happened to that boy, that he had sold his soul to a weak, uncaring, manipulative piece of excrement like Albus Dumbledore and thought it better than all the life experience you had endeavoured to impart on him? True, he's become harder to read, but he's never been able to hide his desperation to be something contrary to his own nature for the Evans girl, and that had, if anything, grown even stronger this summer. And there is nothing at all you've seen in the last two and a half months to indicate that the Evans girl has in any way changed towards him. In fact, it seemed rather the opposite, with that other boy suddenly in their midst, a buffer between them if ever you've seen one._

 _Yet clearly, he has stepped onto a path you had not anticipated for him, one you had not even truly imagined was in his sights. A path he thinks you are too late to pull him off of, and knowing he gets his stubbornness from you and Tobias in equal measure, it's hard do doubt the veracity in his words. But oh, your heart's grown cold with fear since last night, and it'll not be warming back up, because you know how that road ends, you've seen it. Your boy will be dead before he even properly steps foot in his third decade of life, and he will die without even knowing to regret it, because cold as he will be in the ground, he will not get to see that it will have been for nothing, that Lily Evans will not have cared except in perhaps a remote sort of way one regrets the passing of those one found to be useful toys to keep around for one's own pleasure._

 _Life may be suffering, but if it is to be given up, then it should be given up for this reason alone, and not as a present for anyone else's reasons. It is one's own, and it should be lived for oneself only. Wish you'd taught him that in time, but perhaps that too was a lesson you'd been reluctant to pass on to him, bitterly as you've learned it. Sentiment has clouded your judgment, Eileen. Motherhood was not made for you, your parents were right in that, and Tobias too._

 _What's left, then? What is left to be said or done, so that your son is not out of this house at the stroke of midnight on January 9th? Was this how your parents felt when you packed your bags and put them behind yourself forever? Do they think of you and regret the things they'd done or not done? Not bloody likely, they're not those kinds of people, they're not capable of doubt or regret._

 _Do what you've always done – try to make Severus see the world for what it truly is, try to guide him into thinking the way a Slytherin should. It's the only thinking that might spare his life, and he's going to need it, if he is as determined on this path of his as he seems. Making him realise the kind of person that the Evans girl is clearly isn't working, but getting him to understand it will protect him, too, make him less willing to blindly sacrifice his life in an attempt to win her over with foolish heart-bleeding heroics._

 _As for him and Tobias... if he's proven anything yesterday, then the boy's proven he knows perfectly well how to use Tobias for his own ends. No one gets to pick their parents, more's the pity, and Tobias hasn't been the same since the mess that pushed him to the serious drink, true enough, but he's still your husband and his father. You won't tell him what kind of relationship to have with Tobias, not with the hand you'd been dealt on that front yourself, and you'd done plenty of interference in that boy's youth to keep the peace at home, even made him stay at school that year when Tobias had hit bottom and you with him. That ought to have been enough; if he's old enough to decide to go to war, then he's old enough to decide whether he wants to get into needless confrontations with his alcoholic father._

 _Tobias is a disappointment to Severus, it's the state of things. You played your part in it, and that can't be taken back; so has the drink and so have Tobias' demons; so have even your boy's temper and misplaced sense of chivalry that erratically surfaces here and there. None of it can be changed, therefore there is no point wishing it were not so. But at least your boy has the good luck to know where he stands with Tobias, to know what to expect at any given moment and to know how much he will or won't receive for what he demands. It's far more than you'd ever had, and it's certainly more than enough to make something out of. If he wishes it to be blood and insults because the Evans girl has hurt his feelings for the hundredth time, that's his choice, but he will not get your coddling for it._

 _One day, he'll look back and realise that what you've given him might not have been much or what he wanted, but it's most certainly what he's needed and will if he wants to survive, especially with this choice he's made – good instincts, quick mind, and the understanding that the world is not a nice place. How that Evans girl fits into it, he'll have to realise it for himself; he's made himself perfectly clear on how he sees your interference on that point._

 _And since you've long ago realised that hope is a useless emotion that only serves to cloud the mind, all that you've got left is to be watchful in case he needs you, make sure there's always a place for him under this roof, as unwelcome as he sees it, and carry this coldness in your heart until either the war or your son are ended, whichever comes first._

 _It's what you signed up for, Eileen, when you chose to have him in spite of Tobias' insistence on it being a bad idea, when you were foolish enough to think that you have better luck with second chances than with first. There's that motherhood you'd wanted seventeen years ago, those chains around your heart. If you were fool enough not to realise what they meant until you'd had him, you've no one to blame but yourself – not Tobias, nor your parents or those three boys who'd burned your girlish heart to cinders. Not the Evans girl, much as you want to. Not even your stubborn, infuriating, naïve little boy, whom you'd given what little of your heart had been left to you after your youth and Tobias got their share._

 _If there's one thing life has taught you, it's to endure those things you can't change, no matter the cost. Since the moment you held him as a squalling infant in your arms, you knew – there was never any other choice when it came to your boy._

* * *

 **A/N:** This concludes Part II of The Path Not Tread, as well as my posting for now; the story is officially going on hiatus until at least end of summer, though I can't say how much time I'll actually need for Part III, so don't hold me too firmly to that.

I want to thank firstly my quasi-beta, Moon999, for her infinite patience for my last-minute chapter deliveries, as well as her constant help and support regarding character psychology and my writing in general. You rock, girl! Then, of course, a huge 'THANK YOU' to all my faithful readers and those who joined in only recently but sat through what's already a 300k story and won't be ending any time soon, who have left their reviews and favorites and follows. I hope I haven't disappointed so far, and that I won't in the future. Lastly, my solemn promise to get the next part of the story going as quickly as I can, and moreover, to finally get proper movement on the Snily front, as I imagine after this long, everyone's grown impatient (though I fully stand by my belief that Lily and Severus both needed their own developments before coming together, if they were to be the 'forever' kind, so I don't regret a thing).


End file.
